Long Range Patrol: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 1)

by Dennis Foley

  A cute little bar girl, appropriately named Toy, brought the first two Bier 33s Hollister would see. She quickly ran back to the bar and returned with a glass of ice chunks covered with several rice husks. Putting the glass down in front of the first sergeant, she jumped into his lap.

  “Ice for you, Sergean’ Easy. You want V’namee whiskey?” Toy asked.

  Evan-Clark laughed like a department store Santa Claus. Reaching into the cargo pocket on the side of his jungle fatigue trousers, he retrieved a small, well-worn flask engraved with the outline of a green beret and a dagger.

  Evan-Clark poured himself a few fingers of rye from his private stock and waved the flask in Hollister’s direction. “Would the lieutenant like to sweeten his beer a bit?”

  The thought of a Vietnamese boilermaker at eleven in the morning made Hollister’s stomach tighten. “No, Top. I think this beer will be about all I can handle until I get used to this heat.”

  Evan-Clark shrugged, dropped the flask on the table, and turned his attention back to Toy.

  She giggled girlishly as he groped her tiny but unmistakably feminine body. She broke into a pidgin Vietnamese bar girl courting ritual that was common play with Americans. “Easy, I love you too much.”

  “I know. You love me too much, and you love every GI with a piaster in his pocket that comes through those doors.”

  She playfully struck Evan-Clark on the shoulder, making him laugh at her. “You numba ten, Cheap Charlie.”

  Still laughing, Evan-Clark ran his large hand over her little bottom and up under her breast. “Let’s go into the back, girl.”

  She recoiled in mock horror. “No! No can do. Toy very good girl. Toy no can do!”

  The first sergeant reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled out two hundred piasters and dropped the bills on the table. “So, what do you say, girl? Do you suppose that for two hundred P you can do? Or do I have you confused with a real businesswoman?”

  Toy thought for a fake beat and countered, “No, three hun’red P.”

  Evan-Clark took a long pull of his drink and swallowed with a grimace. “Okay, okay. But you better make the top of my head cave in, little girl.”

  Hollister tried not to show his discomfort when Evan-Clark turned to him for some sort of approval.

  “The lieutenant wouldn’t mind if I get myself a little Vietnamese blow job?” Before Hollister had a chance to answer, Evan-Clark got to his feet, threw Toy over his shoulder and headed to the back rooms.

  Pleased that he hadn’t had to reply, Hollister watched Evan-Clark pat Toy on the ass and disappear through the doorway. As soon as they were out of sight, he looked around the room, but was relieved to see that no one was looking back at him.

  With no alternative, Hollister waited, trying to finish the awful-tasting French-Vietnamese beer. While sitting there, he declined several invitations from a parade of other prostitute bar girls who tried to entice him into one of the other back rooms.

  Dragging Toy behind him, Evan-Clark returned. His face was flushed and the veins on his nose were bright red.

  Toy babbled. “Easy, you numba one GI. You my super sweetheart. But why you sweat so much? Toy do all the work and you sweat.”

  “Hush, girl. Go get us a couple’a beers,” Evan-Clark said as he dropped back into his chair and lightly tapped her on the behind.

  After taking a deep breath, he turned back to Hollister. “Goddamn, it’s hot in them fuckin’ little rooms, Lieutenant.” He leaned back in his chair to straighten his leg enough to pull an olive-drab handkerchief out of his pocket and mop his forehead. His size and weight almost crushed the flimsy wrought-iron and plastic chair.

  Toy returned with one beer. “Mamasan say she no hab no mo’ beer. She say mo’ beer come abou’ one hour.”

  Making a disapproving face, Evan-Clark killed the beer in one long drink. While he was drinking, Toy picked up Hollister’s beer, pulled it to her lips and took a long drink.

  By the way Evan-Clark put his empty down on the table, and his reluctance to paw Toy, Hollister could tell that he felt a little self-conscious about his condition and behavior. The sergeant quickly tried to divert attention from himself by looking furtively at his watch. He feigned the sudden onset of punctuality. “Lieutenant, we had better get on the road; I ’spect that the brigade adjutant’s waiting to sign you in and ship you right out to a line battalion.”

  Pleased that they were back on the business of soldiering, Hollister got to his feet without any objection. As he started toward the door, Evan-Clark stopped him. “How ’bout the rest of your beer, sir?”

  Hollister simply shook his head and avoided making eye contact with Evan-Clark. He was not going to tell him that he didn’t want to drink the rest of his beer after Toy had just quenched her thirst with it.

  Looking off to the west, Hollister and Evan-Clark saw the yellow-gray weather front moving in from the inland valley. As it got closer, the temperature dropped over thirty degrees in minutes. The rain began to fall, immediately drenching them. Hollister tried to take his mind off the sudden cold. “Why did the girls at the bar call you Easy?”

  “Ya see, Lieutenant, I was born in South Africa. My parents are British. That’s where I got the hyphenated last name. When I joined the American Army, my buddies started calling me E.C. for short. But when I got to Vietnam, the bar girls thought the guys were calling me Easy, and that’s been my new nickname since my first week in this shithole.”

  “How ’bout the young soldiers?” Hollister asked. “What do they call you?”

  “Oh, they call me First Sergeant Evan-Clark to my face, all right, but I’m sure they love calling me old Easy behind my back.” He chuckled and looked at his watch.

  “We gonna be able to get to Brigade in this rain or is it gonna get worse?” Hollister asked.

  “Can do, easy, Lieutenant.” Easy put his foot into the accelerator and the jeep lurched forward with painful engine-revving sounds as the aging clutch slipped. “We’ll get to Brigade rear soon enough, but you’re gonna have to hold on.”

  Recalling it, Hollister was glad he met Easy that first day in country. It was through Easy that he found out about the LRP Detachment. Over the months that Hollister served as a platoon leader in a rifle company, he listened to all of the stories and fables about the mysterious, elite, and experimental Long Range Patrol unit.

  When he had finished six months in the field as a platoon leader, he started getting feelers from Brigade Headquarters about his interest in possibly being reassigned to a staff job as Civic Actions officer.

  The headaches associated with Civic Actions programs hardly appealed to him. And Hollister had absolutely no interest in a staff job. So he applied for the LRPs. He was surprised and terrified at the possibilities when he was told that he would be going to the LRP Detachment for an interview.

  He and a half-dozen soldiers assembled at the detachment for a briefing and an interview. Captain Shaw, Operations officer, moved the group to a small outdoor classroom. He explained that the LRPs were new, experimental, and constantly changing. In the few months they had been in existence, there had been several changes of mission and a number of reorganizations. All he could promise was more of the same until they figured out the best way to use the LRPs and the most effective organizational setup.

  They were called LRPs because they often worked beyond the range of the supporting fires that normally covered the local patrolling of infantry units.

  Their missions were varied, but fell into raid, ambush, and prisoner-snatch categories. They had tried reconnaissance only, but found it to be too costly in resources for the limited amount of useful information that they could bring in. So reconnaissance became a secondary mission for LRP patrols.

  Captain Shaw went on to explain that every man in the unit was a volunteer from other combat units and they were all handpicked. Anyone who fucked up was immediately sent back to an infantry battalion.

  The detachment was small, only two platoons
of three teams of five men each. Functionally, the headquarters was set up like a small battalion. And the turnover of personnel was a constant problem.

  The LRPs’ biggest problem was support. They had no choppers of their own but had to rely on them to get in and out of the bush. The uncertainty about how many choppers they needed and how often they got chopper support was a problem they hoped to work out.

  Each man accepted into the unit would go through intensive training on patrolling techniques. If he made it through, he would go out on patrols with a few different teams to see how he got along with them. If he didn’t become a problem, he would be accepted as a permanent member of the LRPs.

  Shaw cautioned them that most of the applicants washed out or quit.

  Hollister wasn’t sure why, but the setup sounded good, and it was with troops. He had just about talked himself out of a staff job—it would be too far away from troops. He started out as a line soldier and felt most comfortable among them. If pressed, he might have admitted that he was somewhat intimidated by the thought of having to operate in the more sophisticated environment of experienced staff officers who had a wider grasp of the big picture and proper staff procedures. No, Hollister knew his place was with the troops, and if he didn’t fight to stay with them, he would end up behind a podium briefing visitors or handing out fertilizer to Vietnamese farmers. He put his bid in to join.

  Easy spotted Hollister at the chopper. He said, “You better get on over here and get some of this beer before your sorry excuses for Airborne soldiers drink it all up, Lieutenant.”

  Hollister finished his cigarette, crushed it on the cargo deck of the helicopter, and field stripped it without even thinking about it.

  “Okay, Top. Hold on. I’ll be there in a sec, just save me a beer and don’t let anyone have a second one. We still have a debriefing.”

  Watching for Easy’s wave of acknowledgment, Hollister rolled the shredded paper from his field-stripped cigarette into a ball and automatically slipped it into his pocket.

  Remembering one task still undone, Hollister lifted his aching leg up to the deck of the chopper, ripped the laces on his boot loose and slipped his foot out of it. His naked foot was pale, wrinkled, and traced with the reverse impression of every fold, crease, and seam of his boot. He had stopped wearing socks with his jungle boots after his first week in the field. It beat wrestling with slipping woolen socks.

  An instructor in Ranger School had once told him, “A Ranger’s feet are like an odometer. You can take a look at them and tell how far a Ranger’s gone and how hard the drivin’s been.” Hollister saw that he was starting to stack up some hard mileage from the looks of his feet.

  He searched around for his passenger and found him up under the hemmed edge of his pant leg. The leech was only about an inch and a half long, but he was fully gorged on Hollister’s blood.

  “Need a leech wrench?”

  Looking up, Hollister found Captain Grady Michaelson, his detachment commander, standing next to him holding out the stub of a lit cigar.

  “I been carrying this little fucker around with me all night, sir.”

  “They have a pretty good deal … food, transportation, and free heat all at once.”

  Hollister took the cigar stump from Michaelson, knocked off the ash and then blew on it to stoke the burning end. He then brought it to the tail of the bloodsucker. Before the bright red tip of the cigar ever touched it, the leech curled up toward its head and simply dropped onto the floor of the chopper.

  Remembering that the door gunner would have to clean out the chopper, Hollister swept the leech out onto the landing pad.

  Captain Michaelson stuck his jungle-booted toe out and stepped on it. It gave out a weak pop and squirted Hollister’s blood in three directions, making a star-shaped stain on the pad the size of a man’s hand.

  Blood ran freely from the perfect circle of raw flesh that the leech had left behind on Hollister’s leg. Captain Michaelson checked his watch. “Better get something on that. You know that those things take forever to stop bleeding. And we got to get the debriefing over soon. Anyway, I’ve got two more teams to brief before lunch.” Not waiting for a reply, he patted Hollister on the shoulder, turned and walked toward Operations.

  Hollister liked Michaelson. But it hadn’t always been that way. Michaelson had been at the Ranger School in Florida when he went through the Ranger course.

  The swamps along Florida’s Yellow River were the most disgusting combination of water, mud, decaying plant life, and sheer mystery. That was where he had first harvested a leech.

  Michaelson was a Ranger senior instructor, just back from his second tour of duty in Vietnam, where he’d been an advisor in an Airborne battalion, then a Special Forces detachment commander in the Mekong Delta. It was very rare to find an infantry officer with that much combat experience in the Vietnam War. There was still a large number of Korean War veterans, but the size of the U.S. contingent in Vietnam from 1961 to 1964 was very small.

  Over time, Hollister’s opinion of Michaelson had warmed up considerably. As he watched him walk across the area, he wondered if he would ever be like Michaelson.

  Michaelson was the first soldier who really taught him anything about war. Up until that point he had only learned about tactics, techniques, field expedients, equipment, and a long list of memorized firing rates and maximum effective ranges of weapons. But with Michaelson he learned his first hard lesson about being a troop commander when his forty-man Ranger training patrol was struck by lightning during a freak Florida storm.

  It was the most frightening and chaotic thing that Hollister had ever experienced. The lightning struck without warning, killing two Ranger students outright. It then struck a second and a third time in an area not much larger than a football field.

  Bodies were tossed about by the violent discharge that flashed through them. The air was filled with the smell of ozone and frying tree branches. Leaves and bits of sphagnum moss were hammered from the cypress trees that dotted the narrow sandbar they were on. But there was no way to get away from the repeated lightning strikes. The students panicked and ran, screaming and begging for someone, anyone, to help them.

  When it did stop, the patrol had been reduced by three dead, six maimed, and four others seriously injured.

  Michaelson radioed for medevac choppers, but insisted that the patrol members remain tactical and follow Ranger procedure in preparing the wounded for evacuation. He wanted them to secure a perimeter as if they were still in an enemy-held area.

  Many of the students, Hollister included, thought that they should have suspended the training because of the deaths and injuries. Michaelson was not sympathetic. Picking up on Hollister’s negative attitude, Michaelson grabbed him by the fatigue shirt and stuck his face close. “Ranger, in combat there will be no time for your people to sit around and feel sorry for themselves. No one will let them drop their guard just because they’ve taken a few casualties. What you do here you will do on the battlefield. Now, get tough or get out!”

  He let Hollister go, looked at his watch, and raised his voice for the others to hear. “Ranger Hollister, assume that your patrol has taken casualties as a result of an enemy mortar attack. Your patrol leader and assistant patrol leader are among the casualties. Now, take charge of this patrol, get them organized, and move them out. The longer you let them think about it, the more sorry they’re going to feel for themselves. Soldiers who feel sorry for themselves get to be dead men real soon. Now get ’em going, Ranger!”

  Since then Hollister had needed to use what he had learned from Michaelson, and he was sure that his soldiers were alive because of it. But it didn’t make him any more popular than it had made Captain Michaelson on that night in the Florida swamps.

  A little foggy, leaning up against the side of the chopper, and almost out on his feet from lack of sleep, Hollister was happy that Michaelson had decided to accept him into the detachment. His opinion of the man had changed so much that
if he were asked, the one thing he would say about Michaelson was that he was a good man. And in their business that was as good as it got.

  Michaelson reached the Operations tent, turned to look at Hollister and tapped his wristwatch.

  Hollister got the message. He looked back to Easy and the troops. “Okay. We’re due in Ops in zero five!”

  CHAPTER 4

  DETACHMENT OPERATIONS WAS HOUSED in a large utility tent stretched over a wooden frame, surrounded by crotch-high sandbag parapets. Inside, the plywood floor sagged in places and showed the wear from constant use. Still, it served the purpose. It was the heart and center of all things tactical within the detachment.

  The tent was divided in half by a row of beaten-up file cabinets. At one end of the tent a bank of radios, resting on a bench made out of plywood and two-by-fours, was flanked by situation maps and folding field tables that belonged to the Operations officer, the Operations/Intelligence sergeant, the Fire Support officer, the Artillery Liaison officer, and the Intelligence officer.

  The opposite end of the tent was used as a briefing and debriefing area. A large easel held the map of the local area, covered by an acetate overlay. It was positioned next to a wobbly pedestal podium to which an amateurish set of parachute wings made out of Masonite and painted with a very cheap brush had been nailed. In front of the easel ten rusted folding metal chairs were arranged in two concentric semicircles.

  In the briefing area Hollister sat in the front row with Team 2-3. Behind them sat Easy, Operations officer Captain Ken Shaw, Captain Michaelson, and Intelligence officer Lieutenant Skip Perry.

  At the podium Sergeant First Class Hector Marrietta, Operations/Intelligence NCO, guided them through the debriefing. Those in the front row read from their notebooks. The back row took notes.