15 Months in SOG (24 page)

Pete’s voice came back, excitement in his every word. “This is Five. We have a score. Headed back to the LZ. Over.”

The lucky little bastard, I thought to myself, Why wasn’t it me? I answered softly, “Roger, Five. Any pursuit?”

“Negative, Six. There was just four of the little mothers. We popped three and grabbed one. We’re headed out now for the Lima Zulu.”

I acknowledged and put in a call for Sergeant Boker’s team to pull back to the LZ as well. He rogered, and I turned to signal for my team to wrap it up, when Pham grabbed my shoulder.

“
Dai Uy,
” he whispered and pointed with his head. “VC come.”

Sure enough, two dudes came waltzing around the corner, rifles casually slung on their shoulders, jabbering it up like Mutt and Jeff on a Sunday walk in the park. I had to make a quick decision. Did we take them, or lie low and scoot as soon as they disappeared down the road? I knew we didn’t have much time, but I wanted my own POW badly, so I gave the signal we were going to make a snatch and waited in the bushes by the edge of the road.

As the two soldiers got close, I took a quick look around. Not another soul in sight. It was going to be a perfect snatch, better than John Wayne did in the movies. The two unsuspecting targets walked closer and seemed oblivious to us.

Grinning in anticipation, I eased the bulbous nose of the silenced pistol free of the bush I was hidden behind, aimed and fired.
Sfitt!
The sound was hardly loud enough to bother a skittish cat. My .22 hollow-point round took the first guy right above the ear. He started folding like a limp dishrag, just barely alerting his companion that anything was amiss. The second fellow was just starting to turn when I popped him in his right knee. He fell with a shallow squeal, more like a startled baby than a wounded man. Pham and I were all over him before he even reached the ground. I grabbed his rifle, and Pham smacked him on the head two or three times with the
leather sap he was carrying. The wounded man was out like a light.

I threw his rifle to Pham and gathered up the limp body, throwing it over my shoulder like a sack of flour. The skinny NVA didn’t weigh a hundred twenty pounds; I would have no trouble carrying him to the pickup point. I was so excited I was almost whistling in glee. I had my POW! I suppressed an urge to shout out Tarzanlike in victory.

Just as I reached my hand up to the others for help back up the steep bank, I saw Pham’s eyes widen. I glanced in the direction he was looking. Coming around the bend was the whole fuckin’ NVA Army, or so it seemed. They saw what I was up to and, touchy bastards that they were, they reacted badly to the little drama unfolding before them. Their rifles were quickly being swung onto shoulders, and their scowling faces showed no appreciation for the humor of the situation.

“Jesus Christ!” I screamed. “Give me a hand. We gotta get outta here.”

The ten men in my covering squad opened fire, and the NVA did the same. The bullets of both were passing about a foot over my head. It was as close as I ever was to fainting from fear, but it gave wings to my feet. I charged up the steep slope, still carrying my precious cargo, the rest of my men shooting and retreating right behind me.

There was a
lot
of shooting going on, but I don’t think either side hit anyone from the other. My guys were fast catching up with me, burdened as I was, but I was not about to drop my golden prize, no matter how much he impeded my progress up the hill. We passed the only semiclear spot on the hill just before we went over the top, and some joker on their side took a shot at us with his RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), a bazookalike antitank weapon the NVA liked to use as much as we used the M-79 grenade launcher. It played hell with troops in the open, and that’s what I was at the moment.

The RPG hit behind me about twenty yards. The noise temporarily deafened me, and I felt a stinging in my back,
and wetness on the backs of my legs. I must have taken some shrapnel from the blast, but everything still worked, so I kept running. Even with my load, I was pulling away from the angry NVA soldiers, who didn’t like chasing us around in the bush. It probably meant they would be late to their next stop-off station and a chance to rest their weary feet; those dudes had probably been on the trail for three hundred miles or more, headed on foot to the war.

“Head for the wait-a-minutes,” I gasped to Garrett, who was in the lead. “Then, cut left and circle the worst of it. If we’re lucky, Charlie will rush in and get stuck, just like we did.” I was whistling for breath.

Garrett nodded and kept on humping, not bothering to waste his breath answering me. He led us right to the center of the stuff and peeled off, leading us around the thorny hazard. As the last man made the turn away from the sticker bushes, Garrett threw some branches on the path we left. It might fool the NVA long enough for them to get caught in the wait-a-minutes.

Sure enough, we came out the far side well in front, with the curses and shouts of the entangled enemy sounding ever fainter as we headed for the rendezvous with our comrades and the soon-to-arrive helicopters. “Pham,” I gasped, “call ell-tee Mac. Tell him to get the extraction choppers on the way. We’re being chased and will arrive in two-five minutes.”

After an exhausting run through the dense jungle, we reached the desired spot and joined the rest of my soldiers anxiously waiting for us. Did they look lovely, watching our rear from hasty fighting positions as we ran up the hill toward them.

I leaped over a fallen tree and dropped my prize next to the tied-up soldier who was McMurray’s POW. He didn’t look any too happy at his predicament, but he was money on the hoof, so what did I care.

“How long we got?” Mac asked, looking at the bush behind me.

“I think we got way ahead of them,” I answered, looking back nervously at the way we had just come. “We led them into the wait-a-minutes.”

“Good,” McMurray replied. “The extraction choppers are inbound. We’ll be history in twenty minutes.”

I twisted to look at the back of my legs. “Oh, God,” I moaned. “Lookie at all this blood. I must be hit bad. Check me out.” I pulled up my shirt, a sudden chill of fear shaking me right down to my deepest core. I just hoped I’d survive until I could get back to Da Nang and the Medevac hospital.

“You ain’t hit bad,
Dai Uy
. Just a little nick on your back. It’s hardly bleeding.”

“Well what the hell? How’d I get all this blood on the back of my legs?”

Pham was rolling over my POW. “It belong to VC. He dead,
Dai Uy.
”

“Fuck me to death! He
can’t
be,” I cried as I hurried to my prize. Pham was right, my golden POW was deader than a mackerel. A piece of shrapnel had damn near taken off the top of his head, and it was his blood that was all over me. I’d carried the dead man all that way, while he dripped all over me. I was devastated; my prize was gone, NVA were looking for us, and choppers were on the way. My live POW had become dead meat.

The choppers came, and we scrambled on, flying away from the bad guys, who were still probably hung up in the thorns. My glum face was quite a contrast to the happy countenance of McMurray’s. He was already talking about
his
trip to Taipei.

“You know,” he gushed, “I missed my regularly scheduled R & R because of my bout with dysentery. This’ll make up for it.”

Hell, what could I say? I’d already had two trips out of the combat zone. I couldn’t pull rank on him and take this chance away from him.

Making the best of a bad situation, I smiled and replied, “You got it, Ell-tee. Do a couple for me.”

“Can do,
Dai Uy
, can do.”

Lieutenant McMurray went off on his little reward trip, and I started a new training cycle in the company. He returned in a week, bubbling over with war stories about the booze ingested, steaks digested, and whores invested.

But I was involved with a training program for the company, and time was at a premium, so I never heard all the delightful details.

Combat is just a matter of luck. Luck, fate, roll of the dice, karma, call it what you will. If you hang around fighting long enough, you’re gonna get your ass kicked and handed to you on a tarnished platter. My time to roll craps came up. The ones who had to suffer for my bad luck were the men with me.

Pete hadn’t been back long from his R & R when we got alerted. One of our recon teams ran across an honest-to-goodness pipeline, constructed through the jungle way up by the Muy Ghia Pass, where the Ho Chi Minh trail enters Laos from North Vietnam. Of course, its discovery created a sensation. The team had seen it only from a distance as they were running from contact with the local NVA units that were guarding the pass area from people just like us. It was six to eight inches in diameter and well camouflaged from observation aircraft.

Two more teams were promptly dispatched to see if they could verify the discovery. My company was put on insertion alert, and everyone waited to see what the teams would discover. We were all excited at the prospect of inserting against a target of such importance. If it was a pipeline and its purpose was to carry fuel, then its destruction would be a big coup for CCN.

In preparation for the launch, I took the company up to Camp Eagle, where we would wait out the decision to go or
not. Camp Eagle was farther up country than Da Nang and meant a quicker trip to the target area. Even so, the target was well over a hundred miles away, which meant a long flight in the choppers before we unloaded. It also meant not much chance of quick extraction or resupply. We’d have to take all we needed with us, and be prepared to stay against opposition.

The news was good. A second team had spotted the pipeline, farther west of the original discovery. That is to say, they saw it. The rugged country and lots of bad guys let them no nearer the pipeline than binocular vision. They reported it ran straight west as far as they could follow it, up and down the rugged terrain. That part of Northern Laos was truly rugged, much like the hills outside of Honolulu, but covered with triple-layer jungle as an added impediment.

The brass eagerly received the latest report, and ordered us to insert. They decided to send in two platoons of troops. Since I’d been counting on taking the entire company rather than just half, I put in a call to Major Skelton. He was already over at the radio relay site in Thailand, where he could monitor the ground operation and still have commo back to CCN.

“What gives, sir? I’ve got two hundred men up here ready to launch and you tell me to only take half?”

“That’s a big rog, ol’ son,” he replied. “It’s just too damn far away. It would take twenty choppers to get all your guys delivered. As it is, it’ll take ten slicks (unarmed troop carriers) and four guns (armed gunships) to get your people there. We’ll hold the rest of your soldiers in reserve. If you find something really good, like a refueling depot or something, we’ll bring the rest in ASAP.”

“Damned if I like it, sir. The NVA will be all over me like stink on shit if I get close to anything that good. I sure don’t like going in half strength.”

“Don’t worry so,” was his airy reply. “You’ll be in and out so fast, Charlie won’t know you’re there until his oil supply suddenly goes up in smoke.”

I surrendered. “Roger.” I wasn’t going to get any satisfaction
arguing with the major. He probably was right. If we were lucky, we’d be gone before any of the bad guys knew we were even in the area. Soon, ten slicks full of troops with four Cobra gunships for company beat their way north toward Laos.

I took my two best platoons, even though one of the platoon leaders, Lieutenant Lawrence, had a severe eye infection and was in the evac hospital in Da Nang. Lieutenant McMurray was temporarily in command, and I took Pham and two husky Yard soldiers for my personal bodyguards. I would run the operation and leave Lieutenant Cable in charge of the stay-behinds. He would bring them in as rapid reinforcements if I called for them.

As we beat through the humid air above the jungle, I looked around at the ten men in the chopper with me. Everyone had green and black camo paint on his face and hands or, like me, was wearing black gloves. I had a nice pair of driving-type gloves made to my hand measurements by a leather tailor in Da Nang. We all wore tiger suits of irregular green and black stripes. Every man was loaded to his personal load-bearing capacity with ammo, grenades, explosives, knives, garrotes, pistols, and, for all I knew, rocks to chuck at the bad guys. We also had three days’ worth of water and chow, stuffed in wherever. Add to that maps, radios, batteries, claymore mines for the RON defense, first-aid kits and blood expander, compass, clean socks, poncho, and a hammock for resting. Add to that signal flares, flashlights, strobe lights for night signaling, smoke grenades for day signaling, and cameras to record the damage. It’s a wonder any of us could walk.

The chopper pilot signaled back to me, and I put on the offered headset. He had bad news.

“One of the choppers has a warning light from his engine. He’s turning back.”

I leaned out the open door and looked behind us. A trailing chopper was already returning to the launch site. I had just lost ten men. It wasn’t a very good way to start the operation.
I couldn’t tell who was on it, but silently prayed it wasn’t the one with Lieutenant McMurray. I relied on his unceasing bravery and common sense in tight situations. I wanted him with me on that mission.

We flared over a tiny clearing, where we jumped out and rushed into the heavy brush so another chopper could come in. It took a good while to get everybody off the choppers. In the meantime, the Cobras were flying orbits around the circling slicks, and anybody alive within ten miles knew that the Yanks were coming.

Twice as many ships would have been a mess, doubling the unloading time, so Major S had been right about that. The big, noisy, ungainly Hueys certainly proclaimed our presence to any watchful NVA scout.