Chapter 5
LIKE MEAT ON A STICK
AN EERIE YELLOW daylight settled over LZ Ross as a
dozen glowing flares danced beneath miniature parachutes that
drifted across the night sky, leaving contrails of white smoke
above them. Just beyond the bristle of big guns where the Eleventh
Marine Regiment’s artillery lay quiet, awaiting their inevitable
fire missions once the American counterattack ensued and where the
Seventh Marine Regiment’s 81-millimeter mortars busily thunked out
a mixture of high-explosive, white phosphorus, and illumination
rounds, the flickering lightning and ceaseless thunder from the
incoming enemy 122-millimeter rockets and 60-millimeter mortars
flashed and echoed across the encampment. Red and green tracers
crisscrossed inbound and outbound paths on the fringes as the
infantry companies hurriedly prepared to launch their retaliation,
designed foremost to protect the support base’s helicopter
refueling station. On the quieter side of LZ Ross, through the
surrealistic nighttime’s amber luminance, the silhouettes of five
men dashed from the ground and hurried down a trail toward a pair
of unmanned supplementary fighting positions that overlooked an
untroubled section of the base’s perimeter wire.
“You gentlemen going to make it okay?” King Rat
said as he led the pair of lawyers to the first of the two holes
covered by a low, plywood roof layered with sandbags and ringed
with more sandbags for a parapet. “Just
crawl down that opening in the back here, and settle down. I doubt
we see shit. I hope so anyway.”
“That your foxhole over there?” O’Connor said,
seeing a similar-looking emplacement.
“Yeah,” Rat said, squatting and helping Kirkwood
unload the luggage he carried. “You got a field phone right there
on that dirt shelf in the front, between you two. Just pick it up
and mash the button on the handset to talk. Goose come right back
at you.”
“How long you think we’ll sit out here tonight,
Sergeant?” Kirkwood then asked the black Marine who now sported a
set of sergeant chevrons but who had not worn any rank insignia
when he saw him earlier in the day.
“Probably till daylight,” King Rat said. “You got
ample room in this position so’s one of you can kinda kick back and
sleep. Me and Henry and Elvis, we be sittin’ up mostly. Packed
pretty tight. Back a few weeks ago, when we still had old Houndog
with us, it be me and Henry over there an Houndog and Elvis over
here.”
O’Connor laughed. “I knew Elvis had to have a hound
dog around here someplace.”
“Yeah, old Houndog, he was a pretty cool guy,” King
Rat said sullenly, shifting his eyes down as he spoke.
“He rotate back Stateside?” asked O’Connor
cheerily.
“Naw, we lost old Houndog about two weeks ago,” the
sergeant said, looking at the ground. “He and Elvis, they got put
on one of these cooks ’n’ bakers patrols, you know, just a close-in
security check around the fringes. Anyway, some damned gook got
lucky and just picked him off. Shot him through the heart, where he
had his flak jacket opened up. You know, hot and all. Had it
unzipped. He died just about the time he hit the ground. Old Elvis
over there, he ain’t said hardly shit since then. Maybe two words
in two weeks.”
Kirkwood and O’Connor squatted and looked at the
dirt, too.
“Shit don’t mean nothing, no way,” King Rat said,
looking up. “We take it as it come. You know. That’s all a man can
do.”
“Sorry about old Houndog, Elvis,” Kirkwood said,
and put his hand on the Marine’s shoulder.
“You a couple of nice guys for officers,” Henry
then spoke, having not uttered a word through the entire day and
night that the two captains had seen him.
“Thanks, Henry,” O’Connor said, and smiled at the
three Marines. “All we know is what we learned at Quantico, at the
Basic School. So don’t be shy about setting us straight if we need
it. I’ll do my best by you. Like Major Danger said, we gotta depend
on each other, Marines first.”
“Good to know, Captain,” Elvis then said.
“Yeah, Skipper,” King Rat said, nodding his head.
“Good to know. You gentlemen need anything, just give us a
whistle.”
Squatting on their heels, the two captains watched
the three enlisted Marines scramble to the other fighting position,
twenty yards to their left, dragging the M60 machine gun, several
cans of ammunition, and their individual rifles with them.
FIRST LIEUTENANT JIMMY Sanchez had divided his reconnaissance platoon into a quartet of four-man sections, leaving seven men in his command element, including Tommy McKay, the platoon’s navy hospital corpsman, Petty Officer First Class Ted Hamilton, and his radio operator, Lance Corporal Bobby Sneed, and a four-man fire team. His platoon sergeant, Staff Sergeant Paul Rhodes, had the first of the four-man reconnaissance teams, and responded on the radio net with the call sign Cobra. Sergeant Lionel McCoy had team two, answering to the call sign Mamba. Corporal Kenny Price had team three, answering to the call sign Bushmaster. Corporal Floyd Bennett headed team four, answering to the call sign Rattler. Jimmy Sanchez had the call sign Snake Charmer.
Sanchez, T. D. McKay, and the twenty-two-man
reconnaissance platoon had spent the greater part of the day moving
westward from the base camp southwest of Con Thien. During
Operation Kingfisher, they had reconnoitered this same area that
took them to the eastern fringe of a territory patrolled by
elements of the Third Marine Regiment. That territorial limit now
marked the boundary of their new operational theater, overseen by
the Ninth Marine Regiment, which had the name Kentucky. West in the
Third Marines’ tactical area of responsibility, the region had the
name Lancaster. Two simultaneous operations took place, and Jimmy
Sanchez carefully positioned his Marines so they did not mistakenly
walk from Kentucky into Lancaster, and fall under fire from
otherwise friendly forces.
Once in position, the lieutenant scattered out his
four mobile teams along a line running east and west more than five
kilometers long, patrolling in a northerly direction. With their
exposed skin painted various shades of green, and moving swiftly
and silently, each of the reconnaissance sections worked their way
toward the Demilitarized Zone. Sanchez and his command element set
their position near the crest of a mountain in the center of the
five-kilometer fan. From there he sent out his command section’s
four-man team, led by Corporal Lynn Sanders, call sign Viper,
forward of his position to scout.
Throughout the night, as each team reached
mandatory reporting points, based on time and position triggers,
the respective section leaders radioed Sanchez with short-range,
VHF walkie-talkies, giving him a fix on their locations. From his
station he plotted his map, showing each team’s advance through
their mission objectives. Hour by hour, as he kept track of his
platoon’s progress, scouting the region, searching for enemy
activity, the reconnaissance lieutenant kept note of how the
various positions related to a series of rally points and
helicopter landing sites he also had plotted on his map.
The rally points served as locations where his
force could consolidate, establish their best defense, and make a
hasty departure by air, should the enemy make contact with them and
pursue in force. As part of his patrol briefing, prior to their
leaving the Con Thien base camp that morning, he made sure that not
only did his platoon sergeant and noncommissioned officers have the
rally points and associated landing sites marked on their maps, but
also that T. D. McKay had a clear idea of their locations, call
signs, and emergency radio codes. A thorough leader, Sanchez always
planned for the worst cases while he sought the best results.
“Cobra, Snake Charmer,” the radio squawked into the
handset that Bobby Sneed, a six-foot, three-inch-tall, 265-pound
communications Marine with curly yellow hair, held to his
ear.
“Go ahead, Cobra,” the radioman, who had the
nickname Baby Huey, said in a low murmur, holding his mouth close
to the handset and cupping his fingers over his lips while he
spoke.
“Checkpoint Bravo, no joy,” Staff Sergeant Rhodes,
a medium-sized man who occasionally smoked a pipe and wore
military-issue, black plastic framed glasses, spoke softly.
As the signal came to the radio, Jimmy Sanchez, a
small-framed but solid man whose black hair and dark eyes spoke of
his Latino heritage, had instinctively leaned his head next to the
handset, too, so he could hear the report. Then he glanced at his
buddy, Tommy McKay, a brown-haired, stockily built man with a bull
neck and barrel chest. Although of average height, standing an inch
and a half shy of six feet tall, the lawyer carried nearly 225
pounds of fat-free muscle on his frame. He quietly sat staring into
the darkness with his AR15 carbine, a cut-down version of an M16,
resting across his unusually massive thighs.
“Pretty boring stuff,” Sanchez whispered to McKay.
“More often than not, we spend most nights doing the same thing. No
joy. Just empty terrain. Life in recon is said to be ninety percent
boredom punctuated by ten percent sheer terror.”
“Nothing in between?” McKay breathed, smiling
pearly teeth through dark and light green face paint.
“We get in the shit, it is the shits,” Sanchez
said, letting go a whispered laugh. “Unless we’re part of a major
sweep, which puts a company or battalion at our backs, we end up
meat on a stick. Nobody out here to back us up, so we have to
depend on remaining unseen to stay alive. We carry weapons, but a
good recon team should never have to use them.”
“Snake Charmer, Rattler,” a call sounded on the
radio.
“Uh-oh,” Jimmy Sanchez said, and leaned his head
next to his communicator’s and listened. “They’re between reporting
points.”
“Go ahead, Rattler, Snake Charmer actual,” Jimmy
Sanchez spoke, taking the handset from the radioman.
“Bandits crossing our front, grid coordinate
three-two-five-six-seven-niner, moving eastward, and drifting
slightly south toward your position,” Corporal Bennett said.
“November, victor, alpha, confirmed. Company size unit with some
hand-drawn rolling stock and heavy weapons. Count six
one-hundred-twenty-millimeter mortar tubes. Sir, be on guard at
your location. Confirm sighting two rifle-squad size patrols
scouting ahead of the main body, moving along their flanks.”
“Roger, Rattler, confirm November-victor-alpha
company moving east southeast, present grid
three-two-five-six-seven-niner, heavy weapons, six
one-twenty-mike-mike mortar tubes, advancing with at least two
satellite patrols scouting their flanks,” Sanchez repeated back to
Corporal Bennett.
“Snake Charmer actual, Rattler. Roger the
information,” Bennett responded.
“Snake Team, Snake Charmer actual,” Sanchez called,
sending a blanket signal to all five recon sections. “Copy the
last?”
“Cobra, copy,” Staff Sergeant Rhodes
answered.
“Viper, copy. Mamba, copy. Bushmaster, copy,” the
other teams responded.
“Snake Team, Snake Charmer actual,” Sanchez then
radioed to all five of the four-man teams. “Withdraw, rally point
Tango.”
“Roger, withdrawing to rally point Tango,
Bushmaster out,” came the first response. Systematically, each of
the other four teams answered, acknowledging the platoon
commander’s order to move as quickly as possible to the rally
point, where they would consolidate their force and move away from
the area where Rattler had spotted the NVA company.
“Red Rider, Red Rider, Snake Charmer actual, over,”
the lieutenant spoke sharply in a different handset’s mouthpiece,
calling the operations monitor at the Ninth Marine Regiment’s
combat command and operations center at Con Thien on the long-range
radio that his reconnaissance platoon’s communicator had strapped
to his back.
After a moment of silence, Sanchez repeated the
signal again and again until finally a static-riddled response
crackled through the earpiece. In the same quick, shorthanded
language that he had used with his teams, the lieutenant relayed
the sighting to the regiment’s operations officer, who then
repeated the data to the platoon leader for confirmation.
“Roger, your copy is correct,” Sanchez said, and
then listened again while the regimental S-3 spoke to him.
“We heading back to Con Thien?” McKay whispered as
he, Sanchez, the radio operator, and the corpsman now began to work
their way south from the crest of the hill, where they had lain
hidden, moving toward the platoon’s primary rally point.
“Eventually,” Sanchez replied, whispering over his
shoulder at McKay. “Operations wants us to drift a tad west, and
then get in position to the rear of these guys, along the flank of
the track they took. We’d like to know if that NVA company
represents an advance element leading a main force, or if that
bunch is alone, just in transit to link up with a force already
down here. Did you happen to get a look at the aerial photos they
had at the CCOC this morning?”
“No, I didn’t,” McKay whispered, trying to walk
softly as they descended the slope of the hill.
“The pictures show all along the DMZ the NVA has
begun massing a hell of a lot of forces. They’re getting ready for
something big. Real big. We’ve now identified elements from the
320th NVA Division, the 325C Division, and the 308th and the 341st
divisions. They’re on the move from Laos, all across our front.
Could be headed down to Camp Carroll or over to Khe Sanh, take your
pick. Two good targets. Intelligence suspects that we have
additional units crossing the DMZ to bolster the 304th NVA
Division, who we have confirmed already in this area. Probably
where that company is headed. Hopefully, for us, they’re just in
transit, headed to the 304th, and not a recon in force looking to
engage lost souls in the darkness.”
“Company size unit seems awfully big for a recon in
force,” McKay said, squatting behind Jimmy Sanchez, who now took a
reading off his compass and looked at his watch.
“Big, but not unusual for the NVA. However, given
they’re pulling carts and have several heavy weapons, I think
they’re in transit,” Sanchez said, pulling out his canteen from the
pouch next to his fanny pack and taking a drink. “Let’s hang loose
here a minute, let the Viper team catch up with us. Four more guns
might come in handy. I’m a little worried about these bandits
patrolling along the flanks. Hate to run into them.”
“READ THE SIDE of this ammunition can, just so I know we didn’t get ours mixed up with theirs,” Jon Kirkwood told Terry O’Connor as he climbed behind his partner into the two-man foxhole less than a hundred yards from the operations bunker where they had left Major Jack Hembee and a platoon of command center Marines scurrying from radio to field telephone, reacting to incoming information from the units now engaging the enemy. “In this light, I can’t quite make out what it says.”
“Lake City Arsenal, lot 106, ammunition, M14,
.30-caliber ball,” O’Connor said as he read the label. Then he
popped open the lid and looked inside the can. “See, got these
canvas bandoleers with cardboard sleeves full of M14 ammo. Just
like at the rifle range. Here, take a bunch of rounds and pile them
right in front of you so you can reload your magazine fast.”
“Leave them in the box; they’ll get dirty and jam
the rifles,” Kirkwood said, picking up a handful of rifle shells
that O’Connor had dropped on an earthen ledge in front of
them.
“They won’t jam the rifles,” O’Connor said,
slapping the back of Kirkwood’s hand, causing him to drop the
rounds onto the fighting hole’s dirt floor and sump.
“Now you’ve really fucked them up, Terry,” Jon
Kirkwood moaned as he knelt into the bottom of the fighting hole
and felt for the loose ammunition.
“Forget it, man, we have like five hundred rounds
in this box,” O’Connor said.
“I don’t want to be stepping on them,” Kirkwood
growled, now on his hands and knees in the bowels of the hole,
feeling for shell cases among the debris left by previous
inhabitants of the outpost.
“You’re like an old-maid schoolteacher, Jon,”
O’Connor said with a laugh, shaking his head and putting the
binoculars to his eyes that Major Danger had given him as a
last-minute thought so they could search for movement beyond the
cleared area outside the wire. “Shit, you can really see good
through these things. Amazing at night in just this artificial
light. Here, take a look out there.”
Jon Kirkwood stood and peered through the
binoculars, studying the bushes and trees several hundred yards
beyond the area cleared of vegetation and other cover outside the
wire.
“Anything moving?” O’Connor said, now sighting down
his rifle, and checking the right and left limiting stakes that
designated the zone of responsibility that his rifle covered on his
side of the fighting position.
“Nothing moving, just bushes,” Kirkwood said,
taking the binoculars from his eyes and looking at O’Connor
checking his field of fire. Then he located the wooden stake on the
right side of his position and laid his rifle in the center between
it and the middle stake.
“Remember the last time we did this?” O’Connor
said, smiling. “Cold as a son of a bitch. Remember? Not half bad
here, though, considering the end of November and all. Gotta still
be around sixty-five or seventy degrees at night. Not that
bad.”
“Well, that was the Basic School, and we had no one
shooting live ammunition at us,” Kirkwood said, looking out the
binoculars again, searching the tree lines for movement.
“Remember how it started snowing that night, and we
had water up past our shins? That truly was the shits,” O’Connor
said, looking over the top of his M14, checking his sight
adjustments to be sure the major had properly moved his to a
200-yard battle zero, like he had done Kirkwood’s rifle, and had
shown the two lawyers how to double-check them.
“This isn’t Quantico, Terry,” Kirkwood said,
working the focusing ring on the binoculars to bring a fuzzy object
into sharp definition. “We’re not playing some sort of game in the
Virginia woods either.”
“We didn’t play games then,” O’Connor said,
defending his nostalgia. “I took it damned serious. I knew we’d be
in Vietnam soon enough.”
“I didn’t mean a game like that,” Kirkwood said,
still turning the knob, trying to sharpen the distorted image. “I
meant that was just training. Not for real. This, my friend, is as
real as life gets.”
“We’re not going to see shit, anyway,” O’Connor
said, now laying over the top of his rifle, staring into the
orange-lit night. The attack at the opposite end of the base had
subsided to sporadic popping of rifle fire and an intermittent
mortar explosion. “It’s all dying down.”
“We have a friendly patrol out there, among those
trees?” Kirkwood said, fussing with the focus ring on the
binoculars. “I see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Eight people just ran past that open spot!”
“Here, give me those binoculars,” O’Connor said,
grabbing the field glasses and now looking straight out from the
bunker.
“Goose, Goose, I got eight bodies running across a
gap in the trees about three or four hundred yards straight out
from our position!” Kirkwood spoke on the field phone.
Just as he had made the report, Terry O’Connor
dropped the binoculars on the parapet shelf in front of him and
opened fire with his M14.
“Tell Goose we got sappers running toward the
wire!” O’Connor yelled as he emptied his magazine and snapped in a
second one.
Just as his rifle had fired, King Rat, Elvis, and
Henry opened fire from their hole, chopping grazing fire across the
frontal area with the machine gun and their two M16 rifles.
Behind the trees ahead of them, five hundred yards
away, the telltale flashes of mortars flickered as they belched
several rounds toward the Americans. In a few seconds, the earth
churned and exploded all around the five Marines.
On two small rises to their right and left, other
machine guns opened fire, cutting across the wide, barren flats
before the wire. As the automatic weapons churned across the
wasteland, more enemy mortars rained onto the two flanking machine
gun nests.
“Keep shooting!” Kirkwood yelled at O’Connor, who
had ducked below the parapet of the fighting hole when a
sixty-millimeter round exploded a few feet from his side of their
sandbagged nest. “They’re trying to suppress our fire with the
mortars so they can overrun us.”
“Something’s wrong over there with King Rat and the
boys,” O’Connor said, noticing that now only one rifle fired
sporadically from that position. “Keep shooting man, I gotta go
take a look. We need that machine gun to stop the sappers.”
Terry O’Connor rolled out the back of the small
bunker and raced the twenty yards to the next hole on his belly. As
he got closer, he could see smoke rolling out of a jumble of
sandbags and broken lumber.
“Jon, keep shooting!” O’Connor yelled, climbing
around the debris and pulling it from the hole. “They got hit bad
over here!”
In the bottom of the hole, Henry lay moaning,
blinded from the mortar blast. King Rat had fallen limp on top of
the machine gun. Elvis had taken shrapnel across the right side of
his face and neck. His skin, wet with blood, was speckled with
black. He alone managed to fire his rifle.
“Rat, Henry, you guys need to sit tight,” O’Connor
said. “Jon’s got help coming pronto. Meanwhile, Elvis, we need that
machine gun. Help me get it over to the other hole.”
“Rat might be dead,” Elvis said as he pulled the
limp body from atop the machine gun and shoved it out to
O’Connor.
“Nothing we can do right now except pray,” O’Connor
told Elvis, pulling the heavy weapon to his side and grabbing two
cans of belted ammunition for it. “Can you help me drag the rest of
the ammo with the gun? We’ll move it to our hole; that way Charlie
may leave these guys alone.”
“Yes, sir, I just can’t hear very good and I can
only see out my left eye, but I can hump ammo for you,” Elvis said,
climbing out of the debris of the fighting hole with three cans of
ammunition in his clutches.
“Rat! You and Henry lay quiet! Help’s coming!”
O’Connor shouted down in the hole.
“Yeah, man, we cool,” a voice from the bottom
answered.
DOC HAMILTON SAW the movement first and nudged Jimmy Sanchez, who, seeing the silhouette figure easing toward him, sat up from where he had lain and waved.
“Viper made good time off that hill,” Sanchez said,
turning back toward where Tommy McKay and Doc Hamilton lay on their
bellies next to their radioman, Lance Corporal Sneed.
Suddenly four other silhouettes broke through the
thick undergrowth, and Doc Hamilton reached for Jimmy Sanchez, who
still sat up with his back turned toward the oncoming dark figures.
Before he could pull the lieutenant down, a burst of rifle fire
snapped at them, throwing the reconnaissance platoon commander on
his face.
As soon as he saw the muzzle flash from the enemy’s
weapon, Tommy the Touchdown McKay opened fire with his AR15,
sending his first bullet into the head of the man who had just shot
his best friend. Bobby Sneed took out two of the four other North
Vietnamese soldiers who attacked from behind the leader whom McKay
had killed. The remaining two fell back as the lawyer lieutenant
emptied his rifle’s magazine at them.
“Shit, man,” Jimmy Sanchez said, coughing blood and
gasping for air as he began to writhe on the ground. “I’m
lung-shot.”
“We’ll have to carry him,” Doc Hamilton said.
“Can’t do much for him sitting here. We’ve gotta get him on a
med-evac chopper as fast as we can.”
McKay looked at Sanchez, feeling his heart tie up
in his chest as his friend gasped to breathe, trying to talk but
only able to mouthe a few words as Doc Hamilton dosed him with
morphine, and with a bloody finger drew an M on the lieutenant’s
forehead. Then the corpsman turned the officer on his stomach, and
pulled up his blouse and T-shirt. Finding the three entries made by
the bullets, he rolled wads of gauze bandages tight and stuffed
them into the holes, plugging them so that air no longer sucked
through the wounds.
“That’s the best I can do for now, Snake Man,” Doc
Hamilton told the lieutenant as he eased him on his back and sat
him up. “Plugging the holes should help you pull in air a little
easier. I know it’s not a fix. You’re just going to have to deal
with getting shallow breaths until the folks at Charlie Med can
take care of you.”
“Jimmy,” T. D. said, “you know that gunfire’s going
to draw the rest of those NVA patrols, just like shit draws flies.
We’ve got to get the hell out of Dodge right now. Me and Doc’s
going to lift you to your feet, and we’re going to di di
mao.”
Sanchez nodded his head and gritted his teeth as
his college classmate and the platoon corpsman lifted him to his
feet and draped his arms over their shoulders.
“Grab his shit,” McKay told Lance Corporal Sneed,
who had already begun calling Ninth Marines combat command and
operations center.
“Red Rider, Red Rider, Snake Charmer, flash-flash,
shark bait, repeat, shark bait. Kilo-zero, whiskey-one, actual,
med-evac lifeguard, Lima-Zulu-Oscar,” Sneed repeated again and
again, but heard no response as he lugged his two backpacked radios
and now the rifle and map case of his platoon commander, in
addition to his own weapon and canteen belt. His coded message that
he continued to repeat, with the key words, shark bait, alerted
Ninth Marines operations and command center that the reconnaissance
platoon had engaged the enemy, compromising their presence, and was
now on the run to their primary rally point and its associated
landing zone for emergency extraction. His additional information
advised that the platoon had zero members killed, one man wounded,
the commander, and that he suffered life-threatening wounds and
needed immediate medical evacuation at Landing Zone Oscar.
“Only a couple of clicks past this little ridge,
partner,” McKay told Sanchez as the wounded lieutenant tried to
help the two Marines carrying him by kicking his legs, trying to
run with them.
“Sir, don’t do that,” Doc Hamilton said, now
breathing hard. “Your lungs are full of blood. You can’t get enough
air to support yourself as it is. Relax, sir, let us carry
you.”
Moonlight flashed through the tree branches
overhead as the three Marines ran, carrying the fourth. Ahead of
them a broad clearing loomed, more than three football fields wide,
scattered with low bushes and palmettos in the waist-high
grass.
“Go around! Go around! Danger area!” Sanchez
gasped. “Too dangerous!”
“What do you think, Doc?” McKay asked the corpsman.
Both men knew that time meant everything for Sanchez’s
survival.
“We start moving in the open, with this moonlight,
anyone can see us. No cover out there,” Hamilton said, catching his
breath.
“Why not call the choppers into this place?” McKay
then asked.
“Lots of times these places get pretty boggy, might
not be a good LZ. The lieutenant saw it on his map but chose not to
use it as a rally point or a landing site. I’m sure he had his
reasons,” the corpsman said. “What do you think, Sneed?”
“I’ve jumped on a Huey in a rice paddy before. No
big deal. Can’t be much worse,” the radioman said. “Problem is, I
ain’t got any signal down here. Nothing we can call out on. Rally
Point Tango has good reception, on that little hilltop, can’t be
more than another kilometer or two, just over that next rise. If
Red Rider heard any of my Maydays when I called them right after we
got hit, they’ll have choppers and a reaction force inbound to
us.”
“All our teams have already headed to Tango
anyway,” Hamilton added. “They’ll be on the run to the rally point,
radios off, after hearing the shooting.”
“Okay. You guys skirt the clearing. Stay under
cover. I’ll take Lieutenant Sanchez and cut straight across,” Mckay
then said, streams of sweat streaking the smeared camouflage paint
on his face. “I think I can move faster with him across my
shoulders than trying to do this three-legged foot race with him in
the middle. Grit your teeth, Jimmy. You’re going for a ride.”
The stockily built McKay with his tree-trunk legs
squatted under Sanchez, and bent the lieutenant across his
shoulders. When he stood up, he gave Doc Hamilton and Lance
Corporal Sneed a nod and then took off jogging.
“Try to keep me in sight, but don’t stop for
anything,” Tommy McKay called out. “Run like hell. Meet me at
Tango.”
Sweat poured off Tommy McKay’s body, soaking his
clothes as he ran. He tried not to think of the North Vietnamese
patrols now searching for them. He tried not to think of how easily
the NVA could pick off him and his best friend in the broad
moonlight as he dashed across the wide clearing. He tried not to
think of the bogs and quicksand, the sinkholes and the booby traps
that possibly lay in his path as he ran. He tried not to think of
those things, but he did. He thought of them all. He ran ahead
anyway. His best friend lay dying across his shoulders.
“Hang on, partner,” McKay said as he pumped his
legs. “We’re coming to the other side. Easy as pie. Another
touchdown at the Cotton Bowl.”
Just as he thought he had the clearing behind him,
and could see the forest’s edge standing less than a hundred yards
away, loud snaps and pops cracked through the air, and the ground
suddenly burst with geyserlike plumes of dirt and debris all around
him.
“Hang on, buddy. Hang on!” the former Texas
Longhorn football star turned Marine lawyer and unauthorized grunt
told his best friend as he reached into his heart and shifted his
legs and his stamina to another, more powerful gear. Digging deep
inside himself, far beyond any point he had ever before gone, at a
depth that Tommy McKay had never known even existed within himself,
he tapped into the root of the fire that had all of his life made
him a champion: a source of strength that now released a whole new
man within himself. This newfound energy sent his legs pumping
harder and faster than he had ever before pushed them.
At the edge of the clearing where McKay had begun
his dash for his best friend’s life, a full rifle platoon of North
Vietnamese soldiers emerged. They had begun their pursuit at the
onset of the shooting, and found the easily followed trail within
minutes. Seeing the silhouette of the Marine running across the
clearing with his comrade draped across his shoulders, the
Communist troops began firing at the fleeing target. Like deer
hunters with buck fever, they excitedly yanked and cranked rounds
all around T. D. McKay and Jimmy Sanchez.
“O God, please help me,” McKay prayed as he ran. “I
know Mama talks to You every day about me, and I don’t talk to You
nearly enough, but please, dear Jesus, please be with me tonight.
Keep their bullets wide, and keep my buddy alive. If You can just
do that for us, I can do the rest.”
Tommy Touchdown McKay crossed the more than three
hundred-yard-wide clearing, carrying his 165-pound best friend, in
less than sixty seconds. Although they lost sight of him as he
dashed into the forest, the North Vietnamese never stopped firing.
Overhead and all around, bullets snapped through the branches,
popped through the brush, and burst into the ground, but none hit
T. D. McKay or Jimmy Sanchez.
“YOU REMEMBER HOW to load one of these things?” Terry O’Connor said breathlessly as he pushed the M60 machine gun into the fighting hole and then helped Elvis to crawl inside the shelter.
“I’m kind of busy,” Jon Kirkwood answered, firing
his M14 at more than a dozen enemy soldiers who now ran toward the
barbed-wire fence and coiled razor wire barrier that stood less
than a hundred yards in front of him.
“Push down on that latch, there, sir,” Elvis said,
pointing to a catch on the side of the machine gun. “This deal here
pops up, then you just lay the belt with the first round right
here, and then slam her down. Pull the charging handle and cut
loose.”
“Watch out for hot brass, Jon,” Terry O’Connor
grunted as he shoved the snout of the machine gun over the parapet
and began chopping down small men dressed in sandals and black
pajamas who now ran at the wire, throwing bags of short-fused
explosives at the barrier.
One after another, the Viet Cong guerrillas ran
their suicide charges, hurling their satchels at the fence, trying
to blow open a breach through which the North Vietnamese soldiers
attacking behind them could infiltrate the camp and destroy the
stores of ammunition and fuel that the Americans kept here. As each
wave of sappers broke across the open ground, Terry O’Connor
chopped them down with the machine gun.
With their automatic weapon now speaking terms that
the enemy could understand, Jon Kirkwood focused his M14’s work on
uniformed soldiers who moved through the gaps in the trees, seeming
to direct the charges and mortar barrage.
“Cut off the head, the snake dies,” the dark-haired
lawyer spoke as he put round after round into the dodging shapes of
what he regarded as North Vietnamese officers.
Elvis, with his one good eye, took aim with the M14
that Terry O’Connor had used until he got his hands on the M60. He
picked targets that the machine gun had missed.
Overhead, the Seventh Marines’
eighty-one-millimeter mortar sections had rained high explosives
and Willy Peter white phosphorus projectiles down the stacks of the
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong firing the mortars and rockets into
the camp. The counterbattery rapidly took effect and soon silenced
the enemy tubes, enabling the Marines who defended the line to
focus their fire most effectively against the sappers and
raiders.
Before Major Jack Hembee and a hundred Marine
grunts could swarm the gap where the two lawyers and three enlisted
Marines fought the overwhelming enemy force, the trio of men left
standing had managed to turn back the tide.
“Evening, Major Danger,” Elvis said, smiling at
Jack Hembee as the operations officer put his head inside the
backdoor of the fighting hole.
All along the flank now, dozens of Marines from the
reaction force that accompanied the major set up hasty firing
positions and began shooting at the fleeing enemy. The mortars kept
pushing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units farther out, and
soon the Eleventh Marines artillery began launching their salvos at
them.
“You’re no worse for wear here,” Hembee said in a
relaxed voice. “How about Rat and Henry?”
“They’re over yonder, sir,” Elvis said, climbing
out of the fighting hole and hustling toward the neighboring bunker
where he had left his two buddies. “We took a sixty in the window.
Blew shit out of everything. Rat got the bad end of it. Henry got
it in both eyes. Sir, I gotta check on my two boys.”
“I’ll go with you,” Hembee said, and followed Elvis
to the neighboring hole, where two Marines and a corpsman had
already put a wrap around Henry’s eyes and had King Rat lying on
the ground with his knees elevated.
Behind Major Danger and Elvis, Jon Kirkwood and
Terry O’Connor joined them in a squat by the exploded fighting
hole, watching King Rat and Henry getting first aid. Marines from
the reaction force had moved them out of the supplementary position
and had taken over the watch.
“What do we do now?” Kirkwood asked the
major.
“I’ve got a busy night still,” Hembee said. “Be
nice to catch these guys. So we’ll be working on that for a while,
anyway. You two might hit the rack, though. Elvis needs a patch
job, and I’m afraid my other two house mice are out of commission,
but Goose can show you where to lay your heads.”
“Sir, you don’t mind we catch some sleep?” O’Connor
said, half embarrassed, since the major had work left to do. “I
don’t think Jon and I have shut our eyes more than four or five
hours since we left California on Wednesday.”
Hembee laughed.
“I know how you feel,” the major said. “Seems that
way to me, too, and I’ve been here ten months. You boys catch some
Zs. We’ll get you up and fed before that chopper hits the deck
mañana. Get you on your way to see your clients at Chu Lai.”
“Sure you don’t mind?” Kirkwood said, blinking his
tired eyes.
“Not at all, I insist,” Hembee said, stuffing more
tobacco in his jaw. “Care for a bedtime chew, Terry?”
“I’ll take a rain check on that, Major Danger,”
O’Connor answered with a smile. Then he looked at the operations
officer and the debris and havoc that surrounded him. “I think I
figured out why they call you that.”
Hembee smiled. “Shit does seem to happen, doesn’t
it.”
Elvis looked at the two lawyers with his one good
eye while the corpsman wrapped a battle dressing over the bad one.
He cracked a wide smile, glancing up at the major, and
nodded.
“JIMMY, YOU STILL with me, partner?” T. D. McKay
said to the wounded lieutenant as he gently slid his best friend
off his shoulders and laid him on the ground.
Sanchez raised his hand to let his buddy know he
had held on to consciousness, but when he tried to talk he could
only whisper. He felt as though a truck had parked on his chest. No
matter how hard he pulled with his lungs, he could hardly get air
inside them.
“Relax, buddy,” McKay said, propping Sanchez up
with his back against a tree, trying to see if the upright position
would ease his breathing. “We’re at the rally point. I don’t see
anyone else, though.”
“Quit talking so loud,” a voice came from behind
McKay, and he turned, surprised, to see Staff Sergeant Paul Rhodes,
his black-framed glasses taped across their nose bridge. “That
Lieutenant Sanchez you got there, wounded?”
“Yeah. He took three hits in the back. I think they
got his lungs. He can’t breathe very well,” McKay spoke in quiet
breaths. “We thought it was the Viper team coming back to us.
Caught Jimmy off guard. We took down all but two of the enemy
patrol, though. Those guys may be dead or wounded, too. I unloaded
a magazine right at them, not twenty feet away. The damned NVA wore
flop hats a lot like ours. Silhouettes in the dark. How could we
tell?”
“Shit happens when you go slack. Nobody else hit?”
Rhodes whispered.
“Not in our group,” McKay answered. “You just get
here?”
“Just ahead of you,” Rhodes spoke in a voice no
louder than his breathing. “We heard you breaking timber after that
gunplay, sounded like an elephant stampede, so we took cover. Mamba
team got here first. Sergeant McCoy set them out as security with
my guys. Eight of us, and you make nine. Rattler, Bushmaster, and
Viper haven’t shown their faces yet. Where’s Doc and Baby
Huey?”
“Baby Huey?” McKay asked.
“Sneed, the radio guy,” Rhodes said.
“He and Doc skirted around that big clearing back
about a mile,” McKay said in short breaths. “I had hoped choppers
would already be inbound, so I cut across.”
“You mean that you cut across that wide clearing
about two clicks north of us?” Rhodes whispered, raising his
eyebrows.
Sanchez bobbed his head trying to talk, and began
shaking his finger at McKay. Staff Sergeant Rhodes put his head
close to Sanchez’s lips and listened.
“Lieutenant says I am to whip your ignorant ass for
crossing that clearing like you did, when he told you to go around
it,” Rhodes said, and offered McKay a smile. “Dumb stunt, sir. In
fact, borderline insane. Besides making yourself an easy target in
this bright moonlight, we had that spot circled on our maps as a
confirmed danger area. We spotted it about four or five days ago,
the last time we were out here. Charlie’s got it rigged with all
sorts of interesting items, like mines, booby traps, and punji
pits. They’ll do that to a likely landing site, hoping to catch a
helicopter full of Marines setting down, and blow the shit out of
them. They’ll hose a few rounds at incoming choppers, so that when
our guys offload, they’ll hit the ground running and trip booby
traps or dive on punji stakes, you know, sharpened bamboo. Sails
right through your boot, your body, you name it. I’d like to know
how you made it through there without blowing yourselves up.”
“I ran like hell, straight across,” McKay said, now
feeling his stomach tie in a knot. “No wonder those NVA that shot
at me didn’t give chase. I looked back once, when I got in the
trees, and they still stood there in a bunch, blasting away.”
“I’m sure they didn’t quit on you. Bet they took
the loop around right on the heels of Huey and Doc,” Rhodes said
softly, now checking his watch. “We could sure use that long-range
radio right now to get a medevac in here for the lieutenant. He’s
looking awfully punk. These little fox-mike walkie-talkies work
good close up, but are worthless as a brick trying to talk to
anyone outside a few miles. Maybe an airplane might hear us, if he
had his VHF tuned to our frequency. Sure need to get the lieutenant
some help, though. Doc give him anything?”
“Morphine,” McKay said, and pointed to an M drawn
in blood on Sanchez’s forehead. “He also plugged the bullet
holes.”
“Until Sneed gets here with Doc, all we can do is
hang tight,” Rhodes said.
“SSSSH,” DOC HAMILTON mouthed to Bobby Sneed. Somewhere behind them a man coughed. Quietly, the corpsman and the Marine crawled into bushes and sat, holding their breaths, waiting to see if the cough belonged to anyone they knew.
One by one, North Vietnamese soldiers drifted past
them, working in a fan, hoping to intercept the trail left by McKay
carrying Sanchez. The men wore no helmets; most of them patrolled
bareheaded, a few had on soft caps or flop hats. Most of the
guerrillas wore high-topped canvas sneakers, while a few sported
sandals. They moved through the forest with the assuredness of
seasoned commandos.
Bobby Sneed had seen little combat, but Doc
Hamilton had already finished his first thirteen-month tour in
Vietnam in 1966, with First Force Reconnaissance Company, and less
than a year later had returned for another voluntary tour, now into
his third month with Third Reconnaissance Battalion.
Seeing the enemy soldiers left his heart jumping.
He had the platoon’s radio operator at his side, along with the
unit’s only viable means of communications beyond the hills that
surrounded them. The forests now teamed with NVA prowling all
around the two men. With his lungs most likely collapsed and
unknown internal bleeding, the hospital corpsman first class,
equivalent to a Marine staff sergeant, knew that Lieutenant Sanchez
could not likely survive more than a few more hours without the aid
of a field hospital and surgeon. Somehow he had to get help to
Rally Point Tango.
One kilometer west of where Doc Hamilton and Lance
Corporal Bobby Sneed huddled among thick bushes, watching North
Vietnamese reconnaissance commandos circulating through the forest
trying to find the track left by the Americans they had
encountered, Corporal Lynn Sanders and his Viper Marines had
traversed west and picked up Corporal Floyd Bennett and his Rattler
team. The eight Marines now converged on a path they speculated
that Corporal Kenny Price and his Bushmaster recon section most
likely had taken. They hoped to consolidate their force to twelve
guns, in case the enemy found them, too.
The two western teams and Sanders with the command
section’s forward recon team had heard both the first brief
firefight and then later the volleys of machine gun and rifle fire.
Judging from the locations of the skirmishes, they suspected that
the lieutenant and his command element, and possibly another of the
teams from the eastern side of their reconnaissance fan, had come
under fire, with the enemy perhaps now in pursuit of them. For that
reason they had silenced their radios, complying with the platoon’s
standing operating procedures.
Now adjusting their route to follow a wide arc to
the rally point, instead of a direct bearing, they hoped to move
into the site from the southwest. The new track reduced their risk
of encountering the enemy force they placed, judging from the
direction and sounds of the gunfire, approximately two or three
kilometers north of Tango.
Given the distance and terrain that the Marines had
to cover in their vector away from the firefight, and considering
the threat presented by the two enemy platoons patrolling the area,
likely now in pursuit of their cohorts with possibly an unknown
number of reinforcements joining the chase, Corporal Sanders, a
twenty-year-old lad from Enid, Oklahoma, the senior noncommissioned
officer in the group of eight Marines, estimated that with luck
they might arrive at Rally Point Tango in approximately three
hours. None of the Marines knew that their platoon commander’s life
rested in this precarious balance of time.
“BABY HUEY AND Doc either missed the rally point or had to sit tight someplace,” Paul Rhodes muttered in quiet breaths, rubbing the dark green tape flat on the broken nose bridge of his Marine Corps-issued black plastic framed glasses. He checked the rubber strap attached to the earpieces that held the spectacles tight on his face and looked at T. D. McKay, and then at Jimmy Sanchez. “You still with us, sir?”
First Lieutenant Sanchez blinked his eyes at the
staff sergeant, and tried to raise his hand but managed only a
slight movement. His desperate gasps had shallowed to desperate
wheezes.
“Damn, I wish the Doc was here,” Rhodes whispered,
and looked at his watch. “Lieutenant, you hang in there. You’re
going to make it. We just got to get our boys in here.”
Tommy McKay lay in the brush next to the tree where
he had propped Jimmy Sanchez and draped some brush over him. Rhodes
lay across from the platoon commander, covered as well.
“What if I took a look-see out west of the rally
point and tried to work my way back north?” McKay asked Paul
Rhodes. “I might be able to find Baby Huey and Doc.”
“Bad idea, sir,” Rhodes whispered back. “You’d run
into the trouble that has them sitting tight. Doc Hamilton has lots
of grass time and is not lost. Even Baby Huey has his shit wired
pretty well, too, for a new guy. They went underground because the
enemy probably overtook them. I’m willing to gamble that unless we
hear gunfire from over yonder, they’ll get here. So will the
others.”
“We’ve got to do something pretty soon, or
Lieutenant Sanchez, you know,” McKay said, and looked at his
friend, who now had his eyes closed, panting for air. “He’s got to
see a doctor pretty quick.”
“We’ll head out of here before daylight, with or
without Doc and Sneed,” Rhodes said. “They know the drill. They’ll
know we’ve beat feet out of here and headed back to Con Thien on
foot. They’ll head there, too, if it gets close to morning. It’s
only a little more than six hours by foot, if we hump hard.”
“Why not go now?” McKay asked, still looking at
Sanchez.
“Huey and Doc could show up any second,” Rhodes
said, feeling on the side of his Alice pack and pulling out a
canteen of water. “We get a decent signal here with the PRC
twenty-five. Once Sneed makes the call, we can have choppers
picking us up inside half an hour.”
“Of course, you’re right,” McKay said, reaching to
the side of his utility belt and pulling out one of his two
canteens. “But worst case, we walk six hours. I hate to think about
Lieutenant Sanchez having to endure that ordeal.”
“Odds are he won’t have to,” Rhodes said, putting
his water bottle back. “Price and Bennett and Sanders, they’re all
good leaders, good recon Marines. So’re Doc and Baby Huey. They’ll
get here.”
“Hungry?” McKay said to the staff sergeant, taking
a flat can of cheese and another of crackers from his ass pack
fastened to the center of his utility belt, and started knifing the
spread open with his John Wayne P7 that he had strung on his
dog-tag chain, along with two Danish coins he had as mementoes from
a trip he had taken with his father and uncle to Jutland the year
he graduated from law school, fishing for brown trout in streams
near Viborg.
The strong, sharp smell of the hot Velveeta from
the can made Paul Rhodes’s head snap at attention. Carried on the
slight breeze from the southwest, an alert NVA patrol might notice
it.
He had heard the stories of the Viet Cong and NVA
sniffing out Americans hiding in an ambush. Some of the old salt
Marines had sworn as fact to him that even without a westerner
wearing cologne or deodorant, their Asian enemy easily smelled an
American in the bush, simply from an apparently distinctive
Occidental body odor. Something to do with high fat and red meat
protein diets.
For that reason, Rhodes and many members of his
platoon ate a great deal of Vietnamese food, such as rice and bean
sprouts with small portions of fish or chicken, and minimized their
intake of fats and red meat. Whether or not the scuttlebutt had a
basis of truth, it seemed sensible to him.
If he smelled the cheese upwind of where McKay now
spread it across a cracker, then anyone downwind would smell it,
too.
“Sir,” Rhodes whispered, “try to finish that cheese
and cracker snack pretty quick. Then bury the cans. That shit
stinks to high heaven, and Charlie can smell it downwind if he’s
nearby.”
Tommy McKay’s stomach growled and rumbled as he now
hurriedly jammed the small meal in his mouth and gulped water from
his canteen.
“Sorry,” he said, digging a hole with his K-Bar
knife and stuffing the empty but smelly cans into it and covering
them.
Sergeant Lionel McCoy, a small-framed, sinewy
Marine whose very black skin lay like a shadow beneath the green
camouflage streaks he had smeared on his face and hands, looked
squarely at Staff Sergeant Rhodes, and motioned his hand and arm up
and down, close to the ground. Then he formed a fist with his thumb
pointed downward.
Rhodes and the other Marines lying in an arch past
him flattened in their hides. The staff sergeant looked at McKay,
and motioned his hand toward the ground and showed him a thumbs
down.
The lawyer lieutenant’s mind raced through his
memory of hand and arm signals, and the signs for take cover, enemy
present suddenly flashed clear for him. He took a last look at
Jimmy Sanchez and then slowly and deliberately closed the brush
around his friend.
“They smelled the cheese,” McKay told himself in
his mind. “My fault. All my fault! A lawyer has no business out
here. Now I’m going to get some of these guys killed, along with my
buddy.”
Shafts of moonlight splashed among the black
shadows beneath the trees and among the low-growing bushes and
weeds where the eight reconnaissance Marines, McKay, and Sanchez
lay hidden. To their front an open field barely fifty yards in
diameter offered space only large enough to land a single
helicopter. When the platoon commander picked this site as his
primary rally point, he considered that in a pinch, a chopper could
drop in and fly out quickly. His primary landing zone, a five-acre
meadow, lay just beyond another small rise to their south.
While he lay still, his eyes searching the shadows,
McKay’s mind pictured the map. He saw the small, solid plot with
RPT written by it in red grease pencil, and halfway down the
adjoining thousand-meter grid square just below Tango, he
envisioned the red circle with LZO written in its center. Sanchez
had made him study the map section, every mark, every label. He
glanced up at Staff Sergeant Rhodes and smiled just as a North
Vietnamese soldier fell face down between them, his head nearly cut
off.
Sergeant McCoy had done his quiet knifework on the
now dead man, apparently a scout, part of a larger, nearby
patrol.
McKay’s heart pounded. He had never seen McCoy
move, but somehow now he stood, hugging the backside of a tree as
he watched two more NVA soldiers enter the moonlit meadow and work
their way along the edges. Suddenly, from behind the trees, two
more of McCoy’s Mamba section took the pair of intruders from
behind and silently cut their throats to their spines, and pulled
the dead men into the shadows and underbrush.
Across the small clearing, from its southwest side,
several more figures emerged into the moonlight for an instant, but
immediately disappeared into the black cover provided by the trees
and bushes. McKay wrapped his left hand around the fore end of his
rifle, and his right hand around his K-BAR knife, ready to cut a
throat or shoot his way through the enemy.
He looked ahead at Staff Sergeant Rhodes, but the
man had disappeared. Only the body of the NVA scout lay there
now.
“Anyone here?” Doc Hamilton whispered as he nearly
stepped on the dead man next to McKay.
“Only us chickens,” Staff Sergeant Rhodes answered,
stepping from behind a tree, his knife in his hand, and then
wrapping both arms around the navy hospital corpsman. “Where’s Baby
Huey and that radio?”
“Right behind me,” Doc Hamilton whispered, and
looked over his shoulder to see Lance Corporal Sneed embraced by
Sergeant McCoy.
“You had three enemy scouts traveling with you,”
Rhodes whispered. “McCoy and his team took them out just ahead of
you guys.”
“That’s okay. We’ve got a dozen Marines behind us,”
Hamilton said, smiling. “When we met up with our guys, we had just
sat through watching forty or fifty NVA walking over the top of us,
almost two clicks due north of us, off the west side of that big
clearing. They’re crisscrossing this terrain with a vengeance. Once
Bobby and I got behind the bad guys, we hi-diddle-diddled,
di-di-mao, on a bearing due west. Figured we would skirt the
area wide, and enter the RP from the south. That’s when we met up
with Sanders and Bennett and Price and their teams. So we’re all
here.”
“Let’s call Shark Bait to Red Rider ASAP. We need
some artillery fire missions, a reaction company, and a med-evac
pretty pronto,” Rhodes said, pulling branches away from Lieutenant
Sanchez.
“Bobby already made the call. We did it once we got
onto enough high ground to get a signal out,” Hamilton said, now
looking at Sanchez’s eyes and feeling his cold skin. “Sneed asked
for immediate withdrawal of our platoon, with one serious WIA. As
far as any fire missions, that’s your call to make.”
Tommy McKay squatted next to Jimmy Sanchez, Doc
Hamilton, and Paul Rhodes as the corpsman examined the wounded
platoon commander.
“He’s unconscious or damned near it. Not hardly
responsive,” Hamilton said, listening to the fading heartbeats of
Jimmy Sanchez.
“We need to hiako on over to the LZ,” Rhodes
said, and then looked at McKay. “You’re in charge, Lieutenant.
What’s your plan? I’ll tell you if it’s any good.”
“Glad you asked, Sergeant,” T. D. McKay whispered
back without blinking. “According to Doc, we’ve got two platoons of
NVA swarming on our north end, and we need to get into position for
the incoming helicopters, just beyond that little knoll half a
click south of us.”
“My observations exactly,” Rhodes said.
“We can’t fight well and carry a wounded man, so we
need to send Lieutenant Sanchez with Doc Hamilton and two-thirds of
the platoon, along with either you or Sergeant McCoy in charge, on
over to the landing zone and sit tight on the fringe, like we did
here.”
“Yes, sir,” Rhodes said.
“You know what a rearguard withdrawal is, don’t
you?” McKay asked the staff sergeant.
“A-firm-a-titty,” Rhodes said. “We drift around to
the other side of the rally point, set up a base of fire. Engage
the advancing point of the enemy here, where we choose. Get them
focused on our guns, and then we fire and maneuver backward to the
landing zone. Right?”
“My idea exactly, Sergeant,” McKay said, showing
his white teeth through his green face. “We basically act as decoys
here, engage them in a fight, maneuver toward the LZ while the
choppers land, get our Marines aboard, and depart. Ideally, we get
on the last bird out.”
“You’re in charge, sir. Care to issue the order?”
Rhodes said, and signaled the platoon’s sergeant and three
corporals to gather around the lawyer-lieutenant and him.
“We turn on the VHF radios?” Corporal Sanders asked
after McKay issued his five-paragraph order, following the Basic
School format verbatim: detailing by category situation, mission,
execution, action, command, and signal.
“Might as well,” Staff Sergeant Rhodes answered.
“Turn them on, but don’t key up unless you have to, and not until
after the shooting starts.”
Tommy McKay looked at the group of serious-faced
Marines. Except for Paul Rhodes, McCoy, and Doc Hamilton, all of
the men were barely twenty years old. McKay himself wasn’t even
thirty yet, but felt like an old man compared to them.
“You need to know that I’ll give up my life for any
one of you men, just like Lieutenant Sanchez would,” McKay said to
the small gathering of platoon leaders. “I expect you to give me
something in return for that commitment. Your faith in me as a
Marine, and your obedience to my orders.”
Tommy McKay looked at each man and continued, “We
have three frogs inbound right now. Hopefully they’ll have a
security force aboard to back us up, because that LZ is going to
get hot fast. When those 46’s get ready to launch out of here, you
be on them. Doc, you make sure that Lieutenant Sanchez gets on the
first one.
“Listen carefully: Do not wait for me. I repeat: Do
not wait for me. Don’t think about what’s going on with us out
here. As soon as those birds hit the deck and drop their ramps, you
hustle your asses aboard and don’t look back.
“Staff Sergeant Rhodes, Corporal Sanders, and his
Viper team have volunteered to fight the rear guard with me. We’re
going to be shooting and running. We don’t need anyone holding us
up. Clear? When we hit the LZ, all hell will be breaking loose like
a tidal wave on our backs. Count on it. We’ll jump aboard that last
frog out. At least that’s the plan.”
“Don’t make me have to be getting on that frog and
then find myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting on any of you heroes
to get aboard. You had better be there ahead of me. That’s all I’ve
got to say about that,” Rhodes added gruffly.
As the team leaders departed the briefing circle,
the staff sergeant took aside Lionel McCoy and Bobby Sneed.
“Get the lieutenant and as many of the boys as you
can on the first frog out of here,” Rhodes said, “It’s going to get
ugly.”
Then he looked at Lieutenant McKay for approval as
he continued to speak: “You and Baby Huey hang back, make sure
everybody else is aboard, and then get on the last bird. I want the
radioman next to you so you can keep on top of communications with
us, and with Red Rider. You’re the relay.
“Both the lieutenant and I will have
walkie-talkies, along with Corporal Sanders, who’s got his own, and
one of his boys who took Bushmaster’s radio, call them Viper One
and Viper Two.
“Make sure that the security team from those
choppers and the pilots all know we are out there. We’re going to
come barreling into the LZ with guns ablazing, our hair on fire,
and lots of company jumping up our asses. No doubt you’ll hear us
shooting long before you see us. Don’t let that spook anybody. Make
sure the security teams know we’ll be coming in shooting, but the
other way. I don’t want to be dodging their bullets along with the
NVA’s, too.
“Try to hold the chopper on the ground until we get
there, but don’t get yourselves overrun. Charlie hits the circle
first, you’re going to boogie. Got that?
“We’ll do our damnedest to get aboard. I sure as
shit don’t want to walk home. We may be dragging wounded or dead,
too. I damned sure ain’t leaving anybody, either. Just do the best
you can for us. Got it?”
Tommy McKay nodded his approval, and Sergeant McCoy
gave Staff Sergeant Rhodes a hug.
“We ain’t leaving you,” McCoy said, and looked at
both the staff sergeant and the lieutenant without any expression
on his gaunt, dark face.
While the two sergeants spoke, Tommy McKay had
studied the platoon commander’s sectional chart of the patrol area
that he took from Jimmy Sanchez’s map pouch.
“What about artillery?” McKay asked, looking at
Rhodes and McCoy.
“What about it?” the staff sergeant
responded.
“Lieutenant Sanchez has several on-call targets
marked here on his map, including this rally point,” McKay
said.
“Security will probably have a few sixty-mike-mike
mortars, but I don’t want to sit between them and Charlie if they
decide to lob a few. Furthermore, I’d rather have my ass someplace
else besides here if you decided to launch a major fire mission
into this rally point,” Rhodes said. “We get a bunch of enemy
congregated here, though, and then call it as a target, we get in
desperate straits, it might buy us the time we need to get into the
LZ and aboard the choppers. The pilots sure as hell won’t like the
idea of inbound artillery, though.”
“Coming from where?” McKay asked.
“Twelfth Marine Regiment has units scattered all
along Highway Nine. Plus, they’re augmented by a whole shitload of
army batteries, from outfits like the Fortieth, Forty-fourth, the
Ninety-fourth, Twenty-ninth and the Sixty-fifth artillery
regiments, just to name a few off the top of my head. Damned bunch
of army artillery up here,” Rhodes said. “Pretty much any direction
you want except north of us. That’s Charlie on the other side of
the DMZ with his long-range one-thirties and one-fifty-twos. We’ve
got friendly artillery at the Rock Pile, southwest of us, but those
guns will interfere with the choppers’ flight pattern. Besides, a
short round could take out the LZ. Camp Carroll’s due south of us,
but the same story with the helicopters as the Rock Pile. Only
thing we can get outside our flight pattern that might keep the LZ
out of play would have to come from the batteries based to the east
of us at Con Thien.”
“So we have an artillery option if we can use it?”
McKay asked, folding the map and putting it back in the
pouch.
“Correct, sir,” Rhodes answered. Then he took the
lieutenant by the arm and said, “Last resort, though. Think about
this: It took us eight hours to hump that distance, and we move
fast, so those guns aren’t exactly next door. The farther out from
the fire base, the greater the room for error. Half a minute of
angle off at their end could drop a round on us. You call Tango as
your target, then LZ Oscar could catch an errant round if someone
doesn’t line up the numbers exactly square. Inside a
five-hundred-meter circle, I’d say, which includes the north tree
line at the landing zone, is danger-close.”
“But it is an option,” McKay said.
“Yes, sir, it is. And don’t be afraid to use it, if
we need it,” Rhodes said. “We’ll definitely call in a pattern on
Tango and Oscar when we depart the area.”
“Sergeant McCoy,” McKay said, now looking at the
second senior NCO, “you got it? On my signal, on-call target
echo-zulu-six.”
“Yes, sir, on your signal,” McCoy said.
“Launch a Willy Peter spotter round first,” McKay
added. “I’ll give you adjustments if needed. Once the round hits
the pocket, I’ll give you a fire-for-effect order. Have them lay a
spread two hundred yards right and left of target center. By the
time it hits, I plan to be running across the LZ.”
McCoy smiled and nodded approvingly.
“Sir, excuse me,” Lance Corporal Sneed said, taking
McKay by the arm. “Your call sign. In command and signal, you
didn’t tell us your call sign. Something easy, we can
remember.”
T. D. McKay thought for a moment. Football terms
flashed through his mind, but then he considered that most of the
reconnaissance Marines knew him only as that lawyer from Da Nang.
He looked at Sneed and smiled.
“How about, ‘Law Dog’?” McKay said.
STEALTHILY MANEUVERING THE five hundred meters south from Rally Point Tango to the landing zone in less than twenty minutes, seventeen of the twenty-four men on the reconnaissance patrol now lay hidden with their unconscious and barely breathing platoon commander. They disbursed among the trees along the far southern edge of the meadow designated on their maps as LZ Oscar. Already the sounds of whirling chopper wings beating through the still night air began to echo across the moonlit hills around the rally point and the nearby landing zone.
Hugging the terrain, three Marine Corps CH-46D Sea
Knight helicopters dispatched from Con Thien with a thirty-six-man
security force, split on the first and last birds, closed on LZ
Oscar. The sounds of the inbound choppers’ engines singing as their
twin-rotor blades thumped through the air immediately captured the
attention of the two now reinforced platoons of North Vietnamese
soldiers. The noise drew them due south, at a full-out run from
their cross-hatched search for the briefly encountered enemy north
of Tango, and sent them to intercept the trio of aircrafts as they
landed.
As the point of the enemy force broke through the
north-side tree line at Rally Point Tango, several of the men
tripping over the three dead scouts, Tommy McKay opened fire with
his carbine from the south side of the clearing. Staff Sergeant
Paul Rhodes and Corporal Lynn Sanders and his three Viper cohorts
sent lead flying, too, as the first wave of NVA emerged into the
open. Under the sudden hail of bullets, the enemy soldiers
immediately fell behind cover where their three dead scouts lay,
and returned the volley.
McKay had paired his men into three elements. He
and Rhodes lay in the first position, centered, employing a frontal
enfilade against the NVA, while Sanders and his three Marines made
up the second and third units. The Viper team leader and his
partner engaged the enemy in a left oblique class of fire as his
other two Vipers took up a right oblique position. With the NVA now
halted in a fight, each two-man section began to fall back fifty
yards a jump, one pair at a time, while the other two teams
provided covering fire for the displacing third, leapfrogging
backward.
As they moved rearward, and their shooting became
somewhat obscured by the forest, the North Vietnamese platoons
began to advance forward, flowing around Tango’s small clearing,
also using fire-and-movement tactics.
“Law Dog, Law Dog, Snake Charmer, choppers on the
ground, security team out,” Baby Huey reported on his radio.
“Law Dog, copy,” McKay said, fumbling with the
bricklike handheld device and then stuffing it back inside the
front of his blouse when he finished his response.
“Just reach in your shirt and key the talk button
twice! You don’t have to take it out and say anything!” Staff
Sergeant Rhodes shouted to McKay while continuing to lay grazing
cover fire for Sanders and his men as they moved, and seeing the
lieutenant juggling the radio. “Sneed will hear it and know you
copy.”
McKay gave the staff sergeant a thumbs-up sign and
then sprang to his feet and ran fifty yards rearward as Sanders and
his men now provided the cover.
In the distance, three hundred yards in front of
him, the forest seemed to come alive with the silhouettes of
running men, dashing from cover to cover, firing as they ran.
Muzzle flashes among the dark shadows of the undergrowth
surrounding Rally Point Tango sparkled like sequins on black
velvet. McKay quickly realized that many more than fifty North
Vietnamese soldiers now pursued them.
“Fire mission!” McKay screamed in the handheld
radio. “One Willy Peter, on-call target, echo-zulu-six.”
“Roger, Law Dog,” McCoy responded, “fire mission,
one Willy Peter, on-call target, echo-zulu-six.”
As McCoy repeated back the instructions, Lance
Corporal Sneed relayed the fire mission to Red Rider, who had the
Twelfth Marines fire-control liaison at his side. In seconds, the
single shot launched out of the muzzle of a 175-millimeter
howitzer.
For Tommy McKay, the minute it took for the fire
mission to return with delivery seemed like a lifetime. Then from
his right he heard the unmistakable oscillating rumble of the
artillery projectile traveling inbound, sounding to him like an old
diesel truck gearing down at the top of a steep grade.
Suddenly, like a blinding, bright fountain of fire,
the white phosphorus sprang from the thundering impact, dead center
in the rally point’s clearing.
“Fire for effect!” McKay shouted as he kept firing
his rifle at the swarms of Communist soldiers diving for
cover.
As he issued the order, McCoy and Baby Huey
responded and relayed to Red Rider. In a few seconds, the
175-millimeter howitzer battery came alive with their opening salvo
of half a dozen high-velocity explosive rounds launching toward
Rally Point Tango.
“Everybody run!” McKay then screamed over his
radio, his voice so loud that all five of the reconnaissance
Marines heard him clearly without needing their
walkie-talkies.
This time, as the six Marines ran the last two
hundred yards, shooting as they fled, the time from the fire
mission’s call to the first wave of impacts seemed nearly
instantaneous. Behind them the world came alight with the flashes
of the exploding artillery projectiles, and rumbled as the earth
shook under their feet. Hot air and smoke washed over the fleeing
Americans like a sudden desert wind, and it seemed to the
half-dozen warriors as they ran that the incoming rounds impacted
at their heels.
Before the second salvo had reached the target
area, the exhilarated Marines dashed from the tree line into the
open meadow of the landing zone, where one twin-rotor Sea Knight
helicopter sat with its blades spinning, bouncing on its wheels. On
its down-tilted rear ramp, a Marine in a bush hat stood next to
another in a white aviator helmet, both men waving at these last
six to hurry aboard.
SWEAT DRENCHED T. D. McKay as he fell in the red nylon webbing of the passenger bench that hung along the wall of the shuddering helicopter as it flew south and then banked to the east. The lawyer looked out the ramp and saw Landing Zone Oscar now come alight with incoming artillery. Then he stood up and looked along the seating made of crisscrossed straps tied to tubular aluminum rails. He counted eight Marines who wore steel helmets, and seven Marines wearing bush hats, one with a backpack radio piled at his feet. He looked for Sergeant McCoy and sat next to him.
“You got them on the first chopper out, right?”
McKay asked the sergeant.
“Everybody got out of the zone, sir,” McCoy said,
and then looked down at the metal floor under his feet.
Tommy McKay truly felt alive. In his chest he felt
a rush similar to the one he last recalled feeling as he had run a
touchdown in the Cotton Bowl. The exhilaration did feel good.
“Lieutenant Sanchez,” McKay then asked. “Doc got
him aboard that first chopper okay?”
Lionel McCoy kept looking at the floor between his
toes.
“Sergeant, what about the lieutenant?” McKay
demanded. His heart suddenly pounded, not from exhilaration, but
from panic.
“Sir, he died in the LZ,” McCoy finally said, his
lips quivering and his eyes filling with tears.