by Dennis Foley
Without turning away from the bench-mounted grinder, Hollister’s father spoke over his shoulder. “Son, you better close that door b’hind you. I’m afraid that the wind might get it and pull a hinge a’loose.”
Hollister kicked the door closed and stepped to his father’s side. “Some coffee, Dad?”
His father kept working on the ragged edge of a well-worn chisel. “Thanks. Just put it down.”
After a couple more passes of the tool over the rotating stone, Hollister’s father stopped, raised his glasses and looked critically at the new edge. Without taking his eyes off of it, he picked up the coffee mug and took a sip.
He put the mug down and let the glasses fall from his brow back to the bridge of his nose. He peered over the top of the glasses, searching out an oily rag that hung on a nail near the grinder. Feeling the rag for the presence of oil, he dipped it in the oil dripping under the grinder and then passed the rag over the bright new edge to keep it from rusting. “How is it?”
Hollister understood that his father was asking about Vietnam and how he was making out. “All I can tell you, Dad, is that it’s nothing like what I expected.”
His father turned around and looked at him for the first time. “You okay?”
Hollister looked down into the black of his coffee, cupped between his hands, nodded affirmatively and shrugged.
“My war wasn’t at all what I expected, either,” his father said as he put the tattered and stained canvas cover back in its place over the grinder motor. He paused for a minute to think back and then pulled his glasses from his face, folded them up and slipped them into the top pocket in his overalls.
Those were the first words his father had ever really said to him about war and its effect on him.
His father put the newly sharpened chisel in its place on a pegboard nailed up behind the workbench. “You know that your mama cries at night?”
Leaving again came all too fast for Hollister. He had barely enough time to tell his family about asking Susan to marry him. They were happy for him. They had liked her from the moment they first met her. Hollister thought that it must have been because they thought she was smarter and classier than they were—that she would be good for their son.
His mother came into his room while he was dressing to go to the airport. She quietly sat on his bed and watched him pack while she fidgeted with the hem on the apron between her knees. “Honey, you gonna be careful, aren’t you?”
“Sure, Mom. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay. Anyway, my tour is almost over. I’ll be back before you know it. And you’ll have grandchildren to fuss over.”
Her lip quivered slightly. “That Lucas boy didn’t have much time left over there, did he?”
Tears were silently painting lines down her cheeks before dripping onto her dress. He knelt down in front of her. “Mama, I’m gonna be okay. I’ll be back soon.”
She reached out and touched his cheek. “I read the papers, honey. I’m terribly afraid. Your daddy and I pray for you every night.”
He couldn’t say anything. He just gathered her to his chest and held her while she quietly cried for him.
There wasn’t much to do in the terminal at the Kansas City airport. Hollister had told his folks not to wait. They would have argued with him but his mother had a doctor’s appointment that she couldn’t postpone.
At the ticket counter Hollister stuck his hand inside his blouse to get his tickets. As he handed the agent the envelope, a folded scrap of paper fell out. The agent picked it up from the countertop and handed it to him.
He opened it. The note was on TWA stationery. It was from Tammy, the stewardess on the flight to Kansas City. She gave him her address and phone number and invited him to call her when he returned from Vietnam.
She must have noticed his reaction to the longhair behind him because she added a PS that read: “Some of us appreciate what you are doing.”
CHAPTER 14
HOLLISTER WAS STILL IN a fog as he rode through the dirt roadways of the brigade base camp. He had slept through the whole flight from Seattle to Saigon, only waking up for the refueling stops.
The deuce-and-a-half pulled up to the LRP detachment area and slowed to a jerky stop. Hollister stepped out of the elevated cab onto the muddy roadway and thanked the driver for the ride. The driver nervously pumped the accelerator, killing time while he waited for Hollister to walk around to the back of the truck to get his gear.
One of the soldiers riding in the rear threw Hollister’s bags down for him and then banged on the tailgate to let the driver know they were ready to continue.
The truck drove off belching diesel smoke from its oversized exhaust pipe, and Hollister entered the detachment area. It had hardly been three days since he had seen Susan and he already missed her. He reminded himself to finish the last few lines of the letter he had started in SeaTac airport and send it to her.
Suddenly Hollister noticed something was very wrong. There was no activity in the LRP area—none. The standby choppers were all on the ground with the blades tied down. None of the crew members were even in the ships. And only a couple of soldiers were crossing the compound. They seemed to have no hustle. They moved with some sense of sadness.
Hollister dropped his gear at the step to his hooch and ran over to Operations.
Inside, the entire leadership of the detachment was seated in the briefing area, the overflow standing behind those seated in the few available chairs.
Captain Michaelson was speaking. He looked up, spotted Hollister and stopped. “Welcome back, Jim. Got some very bad news. We’ve lost a team.”
The words felt like a sledgehammer slamming into Hollister. It was every LRP’s nightmare—being overrun.
He quickly searched the faces in the room to determine who was missing. He found Camacho, then Allard, but no Davis. Where was Davis?
Michaelson interrupted the search. “No, it wasn’t one of your teams. It was One-three from Lucas’s old platoon—Smith’s team. Sergeant Davis is over at the mess hall with Marrietta, debriefing the pilots.”
Camacho and Allard looked like hell. They were dirty and muddy and their uniforms were torn. Camacho had a dressing on one of his hands.
The debriefing continued with the details of the actions after the team got hit and after Operations lost radio communication with it.
Hollister would have to get filled in on the earlier details. Much of it was self-explanatory. Patting his pockets for something to write on and with, he realized that he had dropped all that with his bags.
Camacho ripped a few pages from the steno pad balanced on his knee and handed it to Hollister. Grabbing a GI-issue ballpoint from the counter that held the radios, Hollister began taking notes. America never happened. Susan didn’t happen. He was back.
Michaelson had finished the debriefing, getting as much as he could from those who had prepped the team to go and evacuated the bodies afterward. Before dismissing the group, the captain scheduled a meeting for the following afternoon to brief everyone on his conclusions and lessons learned, and what adjustments had to be taken to prevent such catastrophes in the future.
Once the crowd had cleared the briefing area, Michaelson motioned for Hollister to sit. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one.
Lighting the Pall Mall, Hollister took a drag and pinched off a bit of tobacco stuck to the tip of his tongue while he waited for Captain Michaelson to speak.
Michaelson clenched his fists and then relaxed them, letting emotion slip through his usual reserve. “This was fucked! A whole team dead! No goddamn reason for it. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“How’d it happen, sir?”
Michaelson took his foot off the folding chair and turned to the map. He shifted his cigarette to his other hand and stabbed a small hamlet on the map with his finger. “There’s an ARVN outpost here. Night before last they started taking incoming small-caliber mortar fire—sixties. They didn’t have any targets to shoot at and they w
ere only guessing how far out the VC were, so they called for the VNAF to come in with close air support.
“We put up a flare ship and the Viets launched two flights of Al-Es from An Hoa. They dropped a shitload of HE into the area where the ARVNs suspected that the mortar fire was coming from. They say that the aircraft took ground fire, but there were no hits.”
Michaelson stopped and looked at Hollister. “I really doubt that they took any fire. Probably a face-saving thing for the ARVNs who picked the grid coordinates for the zoomies to bomb.”
Hollister nodded. It was not the first time he had heard of manufactured Vietnamese combat.
Michaelson continued, “So, sometime during the night there was a pissing match between the ARVNs and MACV over the truth. It got to the point that by dawn the Province Chief’s honor was at stake and he demanded a BDA to prove that his guys weren’t totally incompetent.”
Hollister knew what Michaelson was going to say. He sighed and put out his half-smoked cigarette on the sole of his boot. He started to put the butt into his pocket, but he was still in his khakis. Bernard, on radio watch at the other end of the tent, reached over, grabbed a small trash can and held it up for Hollister, who flipped the balled-up butt and made a basket.
Michaelson kept on without pausing for the two-pointer. “So the shit rolled downhill and we got a call from Brigade to divert a team to do the bomb damage assessment.”
Hollister knew that a BDA was one of the worst missions possible—nothing clandestine about it. The VC knew that when an air strike went in, they could count on someone showing up sometime later to evaluate the damage—either by air or walking the ground.
“I tried to talk Brigade into getting someone else—like a rifle company—to go count bomb craters and shredded trees. I was told that if we waited to move a slower unit into the area, the ARVNs would claim that the Americans waited too long, allowing the VC to drag off their casualties.”
Hollister shook his head. “That’s bullshit.”
“It gets worse,” Michaelson said. “They said that all they wanted was for the team to go in right on top of the craters, do a body count, pick up anything of intelligence value, and then we’d yank ’em.”
“They land on top of the bad guys? That how it happened?”
Michaelson pitched his own cigarette butt over to the trash can and shook his head. “No. Put ’em down within five hundred meters of the bomb craters. The LZ was stone cold. Which, I guess, is the worst thing that coulda happened.”
“How’s that, sir?” Hollister asked.
“I still had a team to extract and another one to put in before dark. Brigade told me to use up the blade time on our choppers—they’d send other Brigade ships to pick up Smith’s team if it had to be pulled before I finished with the other sorties.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Hollister said.
“I didn’t, either. Well, things got boring at the BDA site and they found nothing to indicate that there had even been mortars set up there. Smith reported that he didn’t think there had been anyone there since the Stone Age.
“Then it started to go real sour. Things got backed up. Brigade choppers got diverted to a rifle company contact on the other side of Brigade AO and—”
“Lemme guess,” Hollister said. “They decided to leave the team in till first light.”
“Bingo. But by 2100 hours last night the team was reporting movement around them. They called for illumination and it stopped for a while. Then it started up around 0300 again. They reported movement, then called in contact—then nothing.
“We thought we got a short transmission over an URC-10, but we couldn’t be sure. Could have been one of the VC fuckin’ with the thing.”
“My people go in?”
“Yeah,” Michaelson answered. “Since we didn’t have commo, we orbited over the location with all the flares and illumination we could muster looking for them. It didn’t take long to find the team.
“Davis took Camacho’s and Allard’s teams in heavy to set up a perimeter and evac the bodies. They were all KIA and stripped of weapons and gear.”
Hollister tried to conceal the shudder that went through his body as he sat looking at the map.
“Get over to your hooch and change. I want you to go with me to ID the bodies.”
Michaelson and Hollister arrived at the Graves Registration Unit near Brigade Headquarters. They hadn’t said much on the ride up, and for a change Bernard confined himself to simply driving.
They arrived just as the bodies were being moved from a crackerbox ambulance and into the far side of the GP large tent that served as the GRU. Michaelson and Hollister left Bernard with the jeep and entered from the street side.
The tent had a small office in the near end improved by scrounged ammo-box planking used to create a wobbly floor. Two desks flanked the room, and the tent was cut in half by a bank of beat-up wall lockers.
A clerk sat at one desk typing on a filthy Underwood typewriter—unaware that the two officers had entered.
A figure slipped through the split in the wall lockers—an older soldier who had probably been assigned to the unit as some type of light duty. Too old for his rank, which was Specialist 6, he coughed uncomfortably before speaking. “Mornin’, sir. I’m Specialist Olsen. You must be from the LRPs.”
Michaelson nodded.
“Well, sir, we are off-loading the remains now. I’ll need you to ID the bodies. If it’s all right with you, we’ll send the personal effects down to your unit tomorrow afternoon after we get everything inventoried.”
Michaelson nodded. “That’ll be fine.” He gestured toward the back of the tent. “Let’s get it done.”
Hollister was not prepared for the undignified way the bodies were arrayed. They had been placed on ankle-high wooden cargo pallets that were laid out on the floor. Each body took up two pallets and there were square Sears window fans at the head and foot of each pallet. There was also a large floor-model mess hall fan that was tilted down to blow across the bodies.
When Hollister looked at the arrangement with a puzzled expression, Olsen caught his eye, sprayed a mist of GI DDT into the backs of the fans and explained, “Keeps the flies from lighting on ’em and laying eggs.”
Hollister’s stomach heaved at what he saw and what he smelled, but he forced himself to tough it out. He pulled out his notepad and fished for a pen, then turned to Captain Michaelson. “Where do you want to start?”
Michaelson looked down at the body nearest his feet. “I don’t think there is any good place. Let’s start here.”
Hollister nodded and watched while Olsen and Michaelson squatted down and turned the face toward them. Michaelson quietly spoke the soldier’s name—Smith.
Hollister liked that about Michaelson, that he knew the name of every soldier in his command. Even the new ones didn’t escape his memory. He even took the time to find out about each man. He knew who was married, who was going back to school after Vietnam, and who had kids. Of course, that made the identification much harder for Michaelson.
“Look at his fatigue shirt,” Michaelson said.
Hollister looked at the body. The lifeless form was a mass of wounds. A bullet had ripped through the side of the soldier’s neck and severed his spine. His torso had what looked like two large fragmentation wounds and his right hand was missing. Hollister fought to keep his stomach calm.
“It looks like the neck wound killed him, but he had all these other hits too,” Michaelson said, fingering the many smaller holes in his shirt. The fragments had ripped the fabric and left the ragged edges of the material stuck in the wounds. “These are Claymore wounds. Damn!”
“Claymores turned around on them?” Hollister asked.
“That’s my guess. They must have put them out so far that they couldn’t see them in the dark, and the VC slipped up and reversed them.”
Hollister scribbled a reminder as Captain Michaelson stood up and moved to the next body. It was worse th
an the first. The contents of the soldier’s lower abdomen were missing. His lower intestines were still back in the bush somewhere, and his lower abdominal cavity had filled up with expanding organs and debris from the field.
Suddenly Hollister felt a little light-headed and the tent seemed hotter. His footing was starting to feel unsteady.
“Cap’n, Lieutenant—I gotta spray some more of this shit,” Olsen said as he shook a GI DDT can and sprayed the bug killer into the fan to distribute it across the bodies. “Sorry, if we don’t use this and keep the fans going, the bodies are a mess of maggots by the time they get to Saigon.”
Hollister was happy to have an excuse to leave the tent for some air.
Outside, Hollister refused the cigarette that Captain Michaelson offered him. He leaned against the tent rope and looked down at the ground. With the tip of his jungle boot he moved a small pebble around. “This is really fuckin’ hard, sir.”
“It’s not going to get easier as long as you wear that uniform. It’s your job. If it didn’t hurt and if it didn’t make you sick, I wouldn’t want you running a platoon, and kids like those in there wouldn’t want you for a boss.”
“But it’s so goddamn senseless. There’s no reason for them to be laid out in there,” Hollister said.
“You and I have to figure out why they’re in there. I’ve got to take responsibility for not fighting hard enough to get out of the mission. But beyond that, we have to figure out why the fuck they were jumped and how the Claymores got turned around.”
Hollister didn’t want to have to come to the GRU again—ever.
Hollister sat in the dark collecting his thoughts. It was only a little after nine, but it was pretty quiet for Vietnam. He might have stopped at the second drink, but all the teams were in and the detachment was on a stand down. He poured himself a third from the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label that rested on his footlocker.
The booze was room temperature and bit his tongue, but it dulled his senses enough to put some distance between him and the unsettling experience at Graves Registration.