365 Days (13 page)

“33 Spider, this is 36. Roger that.”

“36, this is 33. Are you taking fire?”

“33, roger that.”

“36, this is 33. What kind?”

“33,” the voice, strained and tired, came through Dennen’s head set. “Mortars; repeat, mortars. Will mark with strobe.”

“36, this is 33. Roger that. Will come right in.”

“33, affirmative.”

A few minutes later Dennen could see ahead of them a brilliant sharp white light flickering in the center of miles of blackness.

“36, this is 33 Spider. I have strobe in sight.”

“33 roger that.”

The pilot banked the chopper toward the light and flew in over the perimeter defense. Dennen watched the darkened silhouettes of tanks and armored personnel carriers pass under them. The pilot was easing into a hover when the gunner slapped his hands to his face, jerked upright, and fell backwards onto the shell cases behind him. Dennen grabbed him as he began sliding down the cases. Blood, turned a strange metallic green by the flashing strobe, ran out from under the gunner’s helmet. Dennen ripped it off. The whole back of the boy’s head was gone—blown away. Dennen held him till the chopper landed.

In the dark they took the body from him. The first sergeant, a grenade launcher tucked into the crook of his arm, led the way to the Old Man.

It was difficult going. The tracks had flattened the jungle but not destroyed it. The roots and veins were still there, bent and broken, all over the ground. They stumbled through to the center of the base, which was surrounded by tracks—thirty- and forty-ton shadows facing out in a circular perimeter defense with the command track, fire track, and angel track in the center.

The troopers not on guard duty stood huddled up against their machines. No one was smoking. There were no lights. Dennen and the Sergeant had almost reached the command track when one of the 50’s off to their right began opening up. A moment later, an RPG sputtered across the perimeter. Everyone hit the ground while that whole quadrant of the perimeter began firing. The noise was deafening. Kneeling, Dennen tried to see where the fire was coming from. Beside him the Sergeant broke open his grenade launcher and slipped in a round. Suddenly one of the tracks exploded. There was a hissing roar as the gasoline went off and a towering flame lit the whole area. Dennen could see figures hunched over, running from the fire, as the sharp firing of the AK’s broke over them.

Dennen got to his feet. “Get that tank over there,” he shouted. Mortars began whooshing into the perimeter. Silhouetted against the flames, troopers could be seen tumbling over as they were hit.

“Get it going, goddammit,” Dennen yelled. “Get that tank over there.” A sniper round whistled by his head. “That tank! Yes, you, move it out...Now, dammit...There!”

Roaring and puffing, the tank began backing up. From all sides of the perimeter red tracers sliced out into the surrounding jungle.

Dennen, urgently motioning the tank on, stepped out of the way as it rolled by. Gaining speed, it hit the burning track at almost twenty miles an hour, rolling it over into the jungle. With a grinding of metal it pushed the flaming wreck out of the perimeter and into the ground, putting out the fire. There, with tracer rounds skipping off its armor plate, the tank shifted gears and, with its machine guns roaring, began moving back into the perimeter. Dennen gathered some troopers and, moving out toward it, they killed three VC who were following it in. The incoming rounds stopped. The Sergeant found him again setting up a new perimeter.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, “it ain’t always like this.”

“There any patrols out?”

“No, sir, just our perimeter defenses.”

“There should have been!”

The ground was a shambles. All around them, in the suffocating dark night, medics were working on the wounded while the RTO’s were using the radios to call in Dust Offs.

They found the Captain near his command track, but in the dark Dennen could barely make out his face; the light from the radio dials was the only illumination.

The Captain motioned for Dennen to wait while he finished calling for gunships. Dennen leaned against the track, holding his M-16 in his arms. He counted two tanks and eleven APC’s; counting the one that had burned, that would be twelve. Each APC, he figured, carried one 50 and two M-60’s. At 1500 rounds per minute, that was a lot of fire power. Add the tracks together, and the amount became enormous. It would take a battalion even to hope to overrun their perimeter.

“Water, sir,” one of the troopers said, handing him a cup.

“Yeah, thanks. Where did you get it?”

“From the track.”

Dennen shook his head. “How many gallons does each track carry?” He could remember making it a day and a half on two canteens.

“About fifty.”

“Plush,” Dennen said, handing back the cup. Well, he thought, at least he’d be moving in comfort.

The Captain put down the horn.

“Not the best night to arrive,” he said almost apologetically.

“What is it? I mean, what did you run into?” Dennen took off his helmet and wiped his forehead.

“I don’t know,” the Captain said wearily. “Must be a base camp, I guess. They’ve been fighting us every goddamn inch of the way. We’re close to something, or they’d have pulled out. I lost two tracks today—three.” He pointed to the wreck still smoldering in the jungle. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to give it up. They’ll fight when they’ve caught us, or when they don’t want to give something up. Anyway,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. Our forward observer was hit two days ago. You’ll be with the second platoon. I have the third and Sergeant Smith the first. First time with tracks?”

“Yes, sir, first time,” Dennen said. “I was infantry and Airborne.”

“Well, try to get some sleep. I think they’ll leave us alone for a while. Smith, take him to his track.”

A short time later, the gunships came over.

The Dust Offs flew in and out all night. Kept awake, Dennen listened to them moving in and out over his head. The noise was appalling. He had never heard such sustained racket. If the gooks weren’t awake before, they surely were now.

Dennen was pleased at how calm he’d been—his first firefight. He’d been ready. They’d made him ready—the months of training, the time in Florida, jump school. He lay there listening to the movement around him, comforted in the knowledge that he was as well trained as any soldier anywhere.

For Dennen there was nothing unnatural in what had happened. Fighting, for him, was a part of living. The strong won out, and the weak went under. That was all there was to it. Of course there was suffering, but that was the price you paid.

At daybreak the boys, wearing their flack jackets and steel pots, sat on their tracks, eating breakfast, while the Captain met with the unit Commanders. He had the map spread out in front of his track.

“OK,” he said, pointing down at the map. “We’ll go through in column. I want the two big boys leading the first and third platoons. I’ll take the center. When we hit something big, spread out in line and pull back 250 meters and let the gunships and artillery handle it. If it’s big, Brigade will CA in some legs. Dennen,” he added, “if it is big, I want you to put the arty in about 500 meters behind their position. I’ll call in gunships to anchor the flanks, and we’ll drive them into the arty.”

Dennen’s platoon took the first column. Settling into the command seat behind the 50, he motioned them forward, taking his APC to a position behind the lead tank.

It was not yet six o’clock when they began crashing through the jungle. He had never seen anything like it, even in Florida. It was like moving through a thick live curtain. Everything was circular and growing from the top down rather than the bottom up. Great vines—millions of them—some two or three inches thick, intertwined with one another, were anchored to roots crawling along the ground. Shrubs, some the height of small bushes, hid the roots under their tubular branches. Bamboo-like plants, five or six feet tall, shot up straight as poles through the tangle, cutting out what little sun got through the vines.

Bouncing and jumping, the tracks tore their way through this tangle, with the 56-ton tank in the lead to level a path. The three columns had to stay within ten feet of each other to keep visual contact, and even then they lost each other for minutes on end. The noise was always there, and over the smell of rotting plants was the thick nauseating odor of hot oil and gasoline.

They had been moving for half an hour when an APC in the column off to Dennen’s right suddenly spun to its left and began crashing through the bushes toward them, only to stop as suddenly, tilted, with its front end in a ditch.

“31/8,” the radio in front of Dennen blasted out, “31/8 threw a tread.”

“31/8,” the radio crackled again, “how long will it take to repair?”

Dennen stopped his column.

“31/8, about an hour.”

“44/8, 43, and 32 stay with 31. Catch up when fixed.”

Dennen pulled his APC out of the line and pushed through the jungle toward the damaged track. The three support tracks, turning out of their columns, joined Dennen’s APC in a diamond formation around the disabled vehicle, swinging out their weapons to cover all the flanks. Dennen ordered one gunner to stay on top of each track and the rest to stay on the ground. It was grueling, heavy work repairing the disabled vehicle. Guarded by their own tracks, the men strained to remove the heavy links. Far away they could hear the sound of explosions muffled by the jungle. Dennen, stripped to the waist and struggling with the jack stopped to listen.

“Grenades,” one of the troopers said. “The gooks string wires along the trees and hang grenades on them with the pin almost out. The track’s antennas catch the wires, pulling the grenades out of the trees, and bang! Most of the time they get everybody riding on top.”

“Sometimes they hang some phosphorous,” another trooper said. “That really kicks some ass.”

When the tank was fixed, they pulled out. Dennen ignored the path made by the tanks that had gone ahead and pulled his column off almost 100 meters before he turned in the direction the company had gone. He caught up with them about an hour later, and for the rest of the morning the whole unit drove back and forth across their sector.

At noon they lost another APC. It was like a ship being suddenly torpedoed. One moment it was there, riding in column, bold and brassy, and the next it was broken and burning, its insides blown out. The gunners on the other tracks swept their guns from side to side, and the troopers riding on the APC’s took the safeties off their weapons.

Dennen stopped his column and, sliding off his APC, walked over to the burning track. The gunners had been thrown clear; the medic was already bent over one of them. The track was lying on its side and above the tread was a small hole no more than four inches across. The steel around it was smoldering red. Dennen called over Sergeant Smith, and the two of them walked back to the place where the track had been hit.

“The rocket went in like this,” Dennen said, holding his arm up at a thirty-degree angle. “It must have hit right here, where the tracks spun. So the rocket,” he said, looking behind him, “must have come from over there.” Switching his weapon to automatic, he walked with the Sergeant off the path into the jungle. After a few minutes of searching, they found a tunnel. The whole area was covered with them.

“That’s the way it is, Lieutenant,” the Sergeant said. “They’ve had twenty years of making tunnels—all over the area—all over Nam, I guess. Sometimes the tunnels go down deep; sometimes they’re near the surface. When they get near the surface like this one, they run them parallel to where they think we might be going. All you have to do then is punch a hole out of the side, lie there with your RPG, and when a track comes by or a squad, bamb! A second later they’re gone. No need to police up any brace. Gives ’em the jump, don’t it?”

“Yeah,” Dennen said. “But sometimes, we find them out in the open and in a sit-down drag-out, we’ve got them every time.”

They found nothing that day, just a few bunkers. That night they got hit again. Dennen called a few rounds of artillery into the area he thought the mortars might be coming from, and that seemed to be it for the night.

The next day they moved farther west. The jungle was a furnace; at times it hit 120 degrees. If it hadn’t been for the shade, the tracks would have been too hot to touch. The men rode in their T-shirts, slumped over their guns. It was too hot to talk. Even with twenty or thirty salt pills a day some of the troopers collapsed.

That day they found an arms cache and blew it up. Ten replacements came in at night. Dennen sent in prearranged coordinates so he’d be able to call in the artillery right on the deck even in the dark. They took two rounds that night, and Dennen quickly sent ten salvos of H and E into the area. In the morning they found ten dead gooks sprawled among the 105-mm-shell craters.

The next day a loach, flying observation, reported a lot of movement about six kilometers from where they lagered. The loach was shot down and the first APC was hit about a kilometer from the area. A tank was hit a short time later.

A spotter plane reported what looked like a big NVA camp, and the columns pushed toward it. Through the jungle the lead tanks reported figures moving, and soon the gooks broke from cover on their flanks. Dennen emptied his magazine as his gunners were swinging around their 50’s. Two figures collapsed. There was a roar as the RPD’s opened up, and the 50’s and M-60’s began firing back, slicing rounds into the surrounding jungle. A grenade bounced off a track and exploded, fragging the gunner; the other gunner swung his 60 around and cut down the gook who’d thrown it. The moaning of the nearly dead trooper was smothered by an RPG that came whistling in. Hitting the dirt, it buried itself before it went off, throwing a cloud of dirt and flame up into the air. All along the column the machine guns were roaring.

Dennen slammed another clip into the nearest clump of trees. A trooper behind him suddenly pushed him down and threw a grenade out over his head into the bushes. More grenades followed.