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

by Dennis Foley

  Feeling a little guilty about the time he was spending in the shower, Hollister wrapped the towel around his waist and picked up the bowl, placing it on a chest-high shelf nailed onto the scaffolding. He fished around in his shaving kit and pulled out a toothbrush, a tube of Colgate, and a shaving brush.

  While working up a lather, he looked back up at 1-1. They hadn’t even dropped their gear. They had picked up something to drink and were walking slowly across the grassy margin of the landing pad toward Operations. He knew how they felt. There was a terrible feeling of loss, vulnerability, and mortality every time a team took casualties.

  As he shaved, the C&C chopper spiraled out of the sky at a high rate of speed and made a hotdog landing.

  Hollister watched Gladiator dump the pitch off the blades, causing the chopper to settle its full weight onto the skids. As it did, Captain Michaelson jumped out of the chopper and ran over to Operations.

  As Hollister got down to the short and painful strokes on his chin, he noticed Easy approaching. Something was wrong.

  “Sir,” Easy said.

  “What is it, First Sergeant?” Hollister asked.

  “Ah, the Old Man radioed ahead and asked me to round you up. He wants you to get up to the hospital. Lieutenant Lucas’s been hit bad.”

  “Lucas?” Confused, Hollister looked back at Easy and then over toward the choppers. “He was out with One-one? I thought he was on R and R or out with another team.”

  “Yessir—he was with One-one. You want me to go with you?”

  Easy’s offer was a sure sign that Lucas was in a bad way. Hollister scooped up the water in the bowl and made a hurried attempt at rinsing the soap off his face. “No. I’m sure the Old Man and One-one need you back here for the debrief. How’s the other guy? You hear?”

  “He’s okay. Word is that he’s only got a couple’a frag wounds and’ll be back to duty in no time at all.”

  Hollister stepped quickly through the muddy shower area and then broke into a run back to his hooch. He yelled over his shoulder, “Get me a vehicle, will you?”

  In a clean uniform, Hollister stood in front of his hooch buttoning his pockets when Specialist 4 Bernard pulled up in Captain Michaelson’s quarter-ton, the best-kept jeep in the detachment. It was Bernard’s baby, and he took pride in its appearance and condition. Unlike other jeeps, it was spotless, well-painted, and always well-tuned. The vertically mounted spare tire rim was covered by a circle of plywood that had the LRP insignia painted in the center between the words DETACHMENT COMMANDER. Two whip antennas marked the rear quarters of the vehicle and provided Michaelson with long distance communications capability over two FM radios. Even from a distance it was clearly a commander’s jeep.

  “I’m ready if you are, Lieutenant,” Bernard said.

  Hollister jumped into the jeep and braced his floppy LRP hat for the wind. “Let’s go.”

  They made a wide U-turn, heading for the front gate.

  “So what’s the deal with Lieutenant Lucas? What do you know about it?” Hollister asked.

  “I didn’t even know he was out with One-one until I looked at the status board after the contact,” Bernard said as he raced down the dirt roadway of the base camp.

  “Wasn’t that the team leader’s voice on the net during the contact?”

  “Yessir. But the Old Man tol’ me that Lieutenant Lucas went along as an observer. Seems he had an assistant patrol leader in One-one he wanted to check out to put into One-three when One-three’s team leader rotates next month.” Bernard shook his head. “Y’know, I can’t believe that anyone would want to go on any more patrols than they absolutely have to. But that’s Lieutenant Lucas for you. He’s short. Ain’t he?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Couple of months at most. What d’ya know about his wounds?”

  “I heard half a the conversation that Doc Tillotson had with the Clearing Station. It sounded like multiple frag wounds and boocoup serious, sir.”

  They rode the rest of the way to the hospital in silence. Hollister was thinking about the very real possibility of getting wounded himself. Over his months in Vietnam he had formed a very definite attitude about it happening to him.

  It all started that night in Ranger School when the lightning struck. He had never seen people killed or so severely injured before. His reaction surprised him. The dead didn’t bother him that much. They were gone. Something about their death and its finality wasn’t as painful to him as seeing those who were terribly disfigured by the violent trauma, and the burns that some of the students had suffered. It was the first time he ever really understood what the word maimed meant.

  One of the students had been under a tree when the lightning struck. It hit the tree, then leaped to the soldier, striking him in the side of the face. The charge then found the fastest path to the ground through his body. The boy’s left ear, most of his jawbone, and part of his tongue were ripped from his face. As the charge passed out of his body, the bottom of his right boot was blown away from the vulcanized seam which held it to the upper part of the leather and canvas. It took most of the meaty portion of his heel and arch with it and looked like the foot had exploded from the inside. To Hollister that man was maimed. He would never be normal again.

  As a platoon leader in an Airborne battalion and in the LRPs, he had seen even worse. Each time, Hollister was reminded of his feeling of dread of the life-altering impact of being maimed—not dead, but maimed.

  That night in the Florida swamps he said a quick and sincere prayer that he be allowed to die rather than live like that. It wasn’t the last time he said that prayer.

  “Sir, we going in?” Bernard asked.

  Hollister looked up from the stopped jeep at the entrance to the Evac Hospital. He hoped that Lucas would not be maimed.

  CHAPTER 5

  HOLLISTER AND BERNARD WALKED up the dirt path marked off by whitewashed rocks which led to the emergency entrance. The hospital was a mix of tropical buildings with half-screened and half-louvered walls, tents, and a new Quonset hut that served as the hospital’s Clearing Station.

  Inside the Clearing Station a male nurse stopped Hollister and Bernard. “Can I help you?”

  Before responding to the voice, Hollister peered over the head of the seated nurse into the triage area behind him, where several stretchers rested on tall sawhorses. Four of them held soldiers being attended to by small clusters of medical personnel. “We’re from the LRPs. You have two WIAs that were just evac’d?”

  “Yessir, but we haven’t even got their names yet. Can you recognize them?” the nurse asked.

  “Yes, how are they? Can we see them?”

  “One of them’s in pretty rough shape. Lemme go see if you can go in.” The nurse walked back to the treatment area.

  Hollister looked at the normally talkative Bernard. He was silent and slightly pale.

  The size of the LRP Detachment and the vulnerability of the small patrols made every man compensate for the danger by acting as if he feared nothing. Easy liked to remind Hollister that “you have to watch out for them, Lieutenant. They all think that their asses are made out of bumpers.”

  But when they did face the worst, it was with the brutal realization of how truly fragile they were. The bravado was gone from Bernard’s face.

  “You can come back into the treatment area, but try to stay out of the way. Okay?” the nurse said as he returned to the pair. “Your guys are on the right.”

  Reaching the first soldier’s stretcher, Hollister recognized a twenty-year-old LRP from Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

  “Zanger, you okay?” Hollister asked from behind the two medics.

  “Hey, sir! I’m cool. Ain’ no fuckin’ gook good enough to get me! The doc tells me that I might have to go to Japan for a while, but I’ll be back,” Zanger said, pumping to the adrenaline firing up his system.

  Bernard stepped around and took Zanger’s hand, which was entangled in an IV line, to reassure him.

  Zanger made a head ges
ture to a stretcher surrounded by doctors, medics, and nurses attending to the patient. He lowered his voice. “The lieutenant’s fucked up bad, sir. He took most of the shit.”

  Hollister started to work himself around Zanger’s stretcher and toward Lucas. Zanger realized what Hollister was doing. “He’s gotta be okay. He saved my ass out there. Goddamn gooks fucked him up … but he ain’t never gonna be back, sir.”

  A surgical smock moved aside, revealing Lucas’s upper body. Hollister resisted the sudden urge to show the horror he felt. The last thing Lucas needed was to see a friend reel back in shock at his wounds.

  Lucas was an off-white color just short of death. His upper chest was chewed up by several fragment wounds. It looked to Hollister like he had been hit by a ChiCom hand grenade or RPG frag.

  The smock moved again and Hollister saw the ragged saffron splinters of bone that ended Lucas’s arm just below the shoulder. “Luke, it’s me, man—Hollister. I’m here. Can you hear me?”

  One of the doctors on the far side of Lucas looked up and pointed a bloody surgical instrument at a spot where Hollister could stand without being in the way.

  Oh Jesus! Hollister thought when he finally saw Lucas’s face. A tube up his nose was filled with sections of blood spaced by air breaks its entire length. Lucas’s face was pockmarked with more frag wounds, and it looked like Lucas’s cheekbone had been crushed. Blood was dripping slowly out of his ear, and his dry lips were beginning to crack.

  A medic leaning over Lucas’s remaining arm yanked loose a rubber tourniquet in frustration. “His veins are collapsing. I can’t start a new line in his arm.”

  Without looking up, a doctor probing the damage to Lucas’s chest said, “Get over here and do a cut down on this leg.”

  The medic moved around the stretcher and dropped the cold stainless steel instrument tray in the narrow space between Lucas’s knees. He pulled a small swab from the tray and wiped some of the field grime from Lucas’s ankle. Without waiting for it to dry, he picked out a small surgical blade and cut into Lucas’s leg. With an instrument that looked like a crochet needle, he fished inside the incision and came out with a small vein. “I got it,” he said to the doctor at his elbow.

  The doctor looked down at the vein. “You do it. You’ve seen it done enough times. Make the cut as small as you can and force the line into the vein. Let the vein hold the line in. Okay?”

  The medic nodded and cut a small nick in the vein. Blood shot nearly two feet into the air. The bleeding stopped quickly when the medic inserted the small plastic intravenous tube into the vein. Immediately, blood ran into the tube. The medic followed the line to make sure it wasn’t kinked, and reached for the plastic bag of blood expander at the other end. As soon as he raised the bag in the air, the blood left the tube and reentered Lucas’s body along with the fluid from the bag.

  The scene was controlled chaos. The doctors fired instructions and cold medical observations back and forth across Lucas’s body. The clanking of the surgical instruments made its own music, almost drowning out the gurgling and choking noises coming from Lucas’s face.

  From the condition of his head and shoulders, Hollister could only guess that there was a lot of collected fluid and damaged tissue inside his friend’s head. He tried to think of something to do or say. He raised his hand to touch Lucas, but he couldn’t reach Lucas’s remaining hand. So he grabbed on to Lucas’s cold and trembling foot.

  The doctor who had placed Hollister gave a sign of approval with his eyes as he pushed on a large drain tube he was trying to force into an incision he had made in Lucas’s chest.

  “Luke, you’re going to be okay, man,” Hollister said.

  Though one of his eyes was dilated and the other was normal, Lucas seemed to respond to Hollister’s voice. The dilation wasn’t from drugs—there was a strict medical rule about not giving morphine to head-wound patients. So the abnormal iris meant a very serious head injury.

  As he watched Lucas, Hollister noticed that the stretcher beneath Lucas’s head was pooling with heavy blood coming from an unseen head wound. And while all this was happening, Lucas’s eyes searched for something; maybe him, Hollister thought.

  Guessing what it was, Hollister tried to soothe him. “Everyone else is okay, Luke. They got out okay. Zanger has some minor scrapes, but everyone else is okay.”

  Lucas relaxed his clenched fist and tried to raise his fingertips, as if giving some sign of recognition.

  “These folks are going to take good care of you. Just try and relax and let them help you,” Hollister said, on the verge of rambling—searching for the right thing to say. He felt so helpless, and even though no one said so, he felt in the way.

  Lucas began to squirm as the doctors probed the wounds in his face. The squirming turned to thrashing and he started making loud choking noises.

  One of the doctors threw the probe across the room and grabbed a small scalpel off a tray at his elbow. He moved up to Lucas’s head, slipped one hand under his neck and raised it. Lucas’s head tilted back, exposing the curved length of his throat. The doctor drew one finger down the front of the throat until he found the right spot, and then plunged the scalpel into a point near Lucas’s Adam’s apple and pulled the flesh back. The small wound filled with pink bubbles and hissed as Lucas began to breathe freely through it. A second set of hands fed a small section of tubing through the wound and taped it to Lucas’s neck.

  The doctor finally spoke to Hollister. “We have some more work to do here with this young man. You suppose you could come back?”

  Hollister nodded. “Luke, I’m getting in the way.” He squeezed and slightly shook Lucas’s foot for emphasis. “I’ll be back later. You just hang in there, man. We need you—”

  The doctor was getting impatient. “Please!”

  Hollister let go of Lucas and stepped away from the stretcher. He knew that he would never see Lucas again. Even if he lived, Lucas would quickly be evacuated to Japan or Okinawa.

  At the other end of the Quonset hut the nurse who had met them handed Hollister two plastic bags of personal effects, an M-79 grenade launcher, a .45-caliber pistol, and an M-16 rifle. “You want these now or do you want to wait for them to find you guys?” he asked.

  The weapons and gear had to be returned to the unit to reconcile the property books, and the personal effects had to be safeguarded. “I’ll take ’em,” Hollister said. He grabbed the bags and awkwardly scooped up the weapons with his free hand, careful to keep the muzzles pointed away from anyone. He had to assume that no one on the medical staff had cleared the weapons. He was sure that Zanger and Lucas hadn’t taken the time to clear them.

  Outside, Bernard sat in the jeep with his hands crossed on top of the steering wheel and his forehead resting on his wrists. Pale and sweaty, he looked like he was going to lose his breakfast at any moment. Spotting Hollister coming through the doorway, he tried to pull himself together.

  Seeing Bernard’s condition, Hollister shook his head. “Move over. I’ll drive.”

  “But sir … I’m okay. I guess I just ate something that—”

  “Whatever it was you ate, I don’t want it to turn the jeep over with me in it. So I’ll drive. Now get over in the shotgun seat.”

  After dumping the bags and the weapons in the back of the jeep, Hollister popped the empty magazine from Zanger’s rifle and yanked the charging handle back. An unexpended round flew out of the chamber and fell on the jeep floor. He then pointed the .45 at the ground, pressed the release button to allow the magazine to slide out, and then jerked back the slide-ejecting still another unexpended round.

  Leaving the .45 locked and cleared, Hollister then picked up Lucas’s M-79. It had a bullet hole through the barrel and another fragmentation hole in the wide part of the wooden stock. Thumbing the break release on the top of the weapon, the hinge worked and the grenade launcher broke open, shotgun style, at the midpoint. An expended grenade shell casing was still seated in the chamber. Hollister pulled i
t out and looked at it. It was what was left of one of the experimental rounds that Lucas had taken on the patrol.

  From the markings on the casing, Hollister could tell that it was a new shotgun round which contained several large ball-bearinglike fragments designed for wide coverage of a target over a limited range. Hollister wondered if some VC was carrying any of the frags. He dropped the weapon next to the others on the backseat and got behind the wheel.

  They neared the LRP compound before either one spoke. Bernard seemed to get himself together, and felt like talking about Lucas. “He was my first platoon leader when I was a cherry. We went on a lot of humps together. I sure liked him, even if he was a little hard on us.”

  “He’s not dead yet.”

  Bernard looked directly at Hollister. “He’s gonna be. Isn’t he? He looked like shit. I’ve seen that color before. And his arm’s gone, he took a head shot. Hell, sir, it even looked like he had some brain damage!”

  “So now you’re a surgeon?”

  “No, sir. You know what I mean. Lieutenant Lucas is pretty close to buyin’ it.”

  Hollister didn’t argue with him; no point to it.

  Bernard turned slightly in his seat and looked back in the direction of the hospital. “He was who I wanted to have around when the shit started, sir. There was no fuckin’ with Lieutenant Lucas. VC screw with him and he’d level ’em.”

  Back in his hooch, Hollister picked up the letter from Susan. He wanted to read it, but couldn’t get Lucas out of his mind.

  Bernard would probably be the first one to hear about it. The call would come in to the orderly room. Hollister absentmindedly tapped the letter on the field table and looked over at Lucas’s half of the hooch. He dreaded the inventory. It was customary for an officer, preferably one who knew the casualty, to inventory his personal effects and prepare them for shipment back to the States. He was sure to be tagged to do it.

  Hollister lit a cigarette and unbuttoned his shirt to get some air. To get the image of Lucas lying on that stretcher out of his mind, he turned back to the letter. But it didn’t work, so he decided to go with it, and forced himself to remember Lucas—the way he was—as a loud, confident, Airborne Ranger. Hollister looked over at the Teac tape deck that was Lucas’s joy. An old college classmate in the States had made him reel-to-reel tapes of Petula Clark, the Righteous Brothers, the Stones, and Sonny & Cher. Lucas played them at all hours, making their tent a little piece of home.