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

by Dennis Foley

  Hollister became aware of the reducing volume on the music. They were approaching the first fake insert LZ for the second team’s insert.

  In—out. No problems, no ground fire. Hollister took a deep breath and got ready for a second feint. It went the same as the first.

  The actual LZ was coming up too fast for him. He didn’t feel like he had it all together, even though he had done one successful insert already. The gunships prowled the margins of the LZ while the insert ship reared back like a horse—nose up. A second before the ship touched down in the tall grass, the troops started jumping off the skids—something was wrong. The insert ship was rocking erratically. It touched down hard and skidded with a jerky right torque.

  The silence in the headsets was broken by the voice of the pilot in the insert ship. “Fuck! I hit a goddamn stump! Think I’m spilling fuel. Watch me. Comin’ up!”

  “Roger—we are on you,” Shelton said as he dumped the collective to unscrew out of the sky, and spun the nose of the C&C around to get a better view of the insert chopper.

  Hollister looked at the back of Shelton’s helmet for some sign or hand signal that might give him a clue of what his next move should be. He didn’t want to start issuing conflicting instructions to the team or the choppers while an uncertain situation was in progress.

  But he got nothing. No sign from Shelton and no report from the insert chopper. Hollister looked back down at the chopper coming out and the LRPs who were still about five long strides from the tree line they were racing for. He had to remind himself to keep his eye on the troops—Shelton would monitor the crippled ship.

  Hollister grabbed a quick look around, at the chase ship and the two guns. He looked out on the horizon to the east for the forward air controller, who was shadowing them if they needed him.

  If the damaged slick had to belly in, Hollister would need to have the FAC line up close air support to protect the downed crew and chopper while the risky changeover of out-of-fuel choppers took place.

  “Two-six,” the team leader’s voice whispered. “We are down and cold. Out.”

  “Roger. Good hunting.”

  Hollister pressed the button on his drop cord and spoke. “Everybody got that?”

  The door gunner gave Hollister a hand signal that they all got it.

  “How’s the insert ship?”

  “He split the belly open and he’s losing fuel, but I think we can get him across the valley if not all the way to the base camp,” Shelton answered.

  “If he can’t make it?”

  “If he has to put it down, we’ve got lots of places. I’m gonna kick this fucker in the ass and try to get in front of him to help look for good LZs. Chase will follow him, and I’m going to let the guns orbit a big one back over the teams till things quiet down on the LZ. Okay with you, chief?” Shelton asked Hollister.

  “Okay. You got it from here, sir. Unless we get a contact call from one of the teams.”

  “Rog.”

  Hollister turned to Michaelson. He had forgotten that the Old Man was even in the aircraft. He was sitting back with his arms across his chest. He nodded at Hollister. “Not bad for your first day on the job. Not bad.”

  Hollister smiled. He wondered how many more of those kinds of mornings he would have. How many more could he handle? He searched his pockets for his cigarettes. As he lit one, he alternately watched the crippled ship and the tree line where the LRPs had disappeared.

  As they got within sight of the base camp, Shelton tuned in The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” and brought a smile to everyone’s face in the chopper.

  “Hell, he’s okay,” Captain Shelton said as the damaged slick broke left from the formation and headed for the Aviation company maintenance area.

  Shelton broke right with the other slick and headed for the LRP pad.

  Hollister looked down at the pad. From the margin, Easy held his hand up to shade his eyes as he watched Shelton jockey the C&C onto the mark. Off to one side a three-quarter-ton truck stood by with a soldier sitting in the cab.

  Shelton let the chopper settle onto the skids and rolled off the throttle. As the lift disappeared, the skids spread and creaked under the weight of the load.

  Hollister unbuckled his seat belt, pressed the transmit button before the others took off their helmets, and said, “Thanks, everyone. You sure made it look easy out there.”

  Shelton raised his fist and gave a railroad engineer’s pumping motion.

  While Shelton shut down the chopper and got loose from his harness and chicken plate, Michaelson folded his map and slowly moved to get out of the aircraft.

  When the entire insert crew had crossed the pad, heading toward the mess hall, the canvas drop in the back of the truck flipped open and the entire detachment headquarters leaped out yelling and squirting beer cans at Hollister.

  Captain Shaw had a can in each hand, which he simply held inverted over Hollister’s head. With the spray they were directing from their cans, Lieutenant Perry and Easy were trying to outdo each other for distance. Sergeants Marrietta and Tillotson applauded and whistled.

  “Hey! Wait a minute. What’s all this?” Hollister asked while trying to dodge the beer.

  “Just tradition, Ranger. This marks your busting your cherry on your first insert,” Captain Michaelson said.

  Dripping with cold beer, Hollister looked at Michaelson to see if he was serious. “What tradition?”

  “Just started it. It’s a new tradition,” Easy said.

  Hollister had to go to the CP to take the phone call. It was coming in on a line not patched to his field phone in the hooch. A friend who was working in Personnel at IFFV Headquarters in Nha Trang had called to say he had just seen a casualty feeder report on Kerry French—Hollister’s old OCS roommate.

  French had been critically wounded and was in the Division hospital at An Khe. The description of the damage was not complete, but it appeared from the skimpy information that the odds were against Kerry.

  Michaelson overheard the conversation, stepped out into the outer office, and relit his cigar. “You got forty-eight hours. That’s as long as I can do without you,” he said without looking up from his Zippo.

  Hollister was surprised at the gesture. “Thank you, sir. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t thank me. Being a wonderful commander and an inspiration to my troops just comes natural,” Michaelson said, tilting his head back to avoid the smoke coming from the cigar. Then he smiled and took the cigar from his mouth. “Seriously, go on up there and see if you can make him feel a little better.”

  Hollister paced up and down on the dirt runway at the Dong Tre Special Forces camp northwest of An Hoa. He was impatient to get going again. But he had to wait for the Montagnard soldiers to unload the resupply cargo the twin engine Caribou brought to their remote outpost.

  The flight started early that morning in An Hoa—the milk run to all of the Special Forces camps from the South China Sea to the Laotian border. The plane would have to stop at An Khe for fuel. That’s where Hollister would get off.

  As he waited he thought about Michaelson’s generosity. He realized what a complex man Michaelson was. The same Michaelson who had seemed so cold in Ranger School and so controlled in combat knew how important it would be for him to see Kerry.

  Hollister hadn’t spent much time in Caribous. But they had a good reputation with the troops. They were solid-looking, army olive-drab instead of air force gray, and also had a throaty sound from the exhaust ports on their wing-mounted engines. They sounded healthy—like a tuned, overpowered hot rod.

  The cargo compartment was like a scaled-down C-130. The length of the compartment was lined with red nylon webbed seats for passengers, and the center of the floor had rows of rollers that allowed cargo to be moved in and out easily.

  Riding in a Caribou had a less intimidating feel to it than a C-130. Gone was the feel of the very powerful machine and greater engine noises. The more compact Caribou felt lik
e a sports car of the cargo planes.

  Hollister had picked a seat at the far end of the cargo compartment, near the open ramp. He watched the beautiful and changing landscape scroll by.

  The rice paddies gave way to the gently rolling foothills that would become the Central Highlands. As the terrain changed, so did the population. It was most dense nearer the coastline and Highway 1.

  As the Caribou flew deeper into the mountainous terrain, the vegetation changed to wild tropical rain forest with taller and taller hardwood trees.

  The ethnic shift toward the interior was away from Vietnamese nationals to the tribal Montagnards—mountain people. In the area that the Caribou crossed, the tribes were the Rhade, Jarai, and the Mnong.

  Hollister knew a little about the Montagnards—that they were nomadic farmers who cleared small plots by burning them first. From the few he had met, he knew that he liked their independence, sense of dignity, and total self-reliance. They were not far from the Stone Age man that must have inhabited the same mountains. What they lacked in sophistication they more than made up for with their mastery of nature and things unwritten.

  The terrain kept climbing. As it did, the vegetation got thicker and darker. Eventually there was no sign of the floor of the forests that densely covered the highlands. The only glimpse of the ground was the thin red-orange ribbon of roadways that had been cut through the mountain passes.

  After two more stops, the Caribou took off for An Khe, the base camp of the First Air Cavalry Division.

  As they approached An Khe, Hollister got his first glimpse of the sprawling combat base. An Khe was not like any other division base—it took up much more real estate. They needed the extra space for the area known as the golf course, large fields cleared to park the division’s 418 helicopters.

  Each chopper was spaced a safe distance from any other chopper to prevent their being bunched up and making a good target for VC mortars or rockets.

  In addition to the golf course and the general size of the base camp, there was another distinctive terrain feature right in the middle of the camp. It was the small hill that Kerry French had told Hollister about back at Camp Zama, in Japan—Hong Kong mountain.

  On the side of the hill, the division engineers had poured a massive slab of concrete in the shape of the division’s shoulder patch, often called the horse blanket. The slab was painted in the black and yellow colors of the division, complete with the diagonal slash and the horse’s head.

  The base camp was a hub of activities. All of the dirt roads were clogged with vehicles, soldiers, and Vietnamese civilians—all in a hurry to get somewhere else inside the perimeter. Everyone was covered with a layer of the fine dust that was constantly kicked up by the endless stream of vehicles and nonstop helicopter traffic.

  As Hollister rode across the base camp in the back of a deuce-and-a-half, he looked up at the top of the hill for any evidence of Kerry French’s countermortar effort and saw nothing.

  The Staff Sergeant in the orderly room of the Admin company started off on the wrong foot with Hollister, who had asked for directions to the Division hospital and a suggestion on where he might find somewhere to flop for the night.

  “You mean that you don’t have orders assigning you TDY or PCS to this division?”

  “Sergeant, I asked for directions to the hospital and a place to lay up tonight,” Hollister said. “I am here on a VOCO pass from my unit. Not everyone in this damn war is either in the Cav or trying to get in the Cav.” Hollister was immediately irritated by the aloof attitude of the smug NCO wearing a clean, starched set of fatigues which showed that he did not go to the field.

  “Well, Lieutenant, I think you are going to have a problem because it is Division policy that all persons arriving are expected to report to—”

  Overcoming his urge to grab the soldier by the shirt and pop him with his fist, Hollister turned and walked back out of the tent.

  As he walked down a path flanked with dusty whitewashed rocks, Hollister tried to talk himself down. He had never had a temper, at least not before Vietnam, and he had again surprised himself at how angry he got at the NCO’s attitude.

  Hollister squared his hat away on his head and looked up; a crackerbox ambulance was coming down the road. He stepped out into its path and flagged it down.

  The baby-faced shirtless black soldier driving the ambulance had a large and engaging grin. His wire-rimmed glasses had their own film of what Hollister was already thinking of as Cavalry dust.

  During the ride to the medical battalion area, Hollister and the PFC got acquainted. The driver told Hollister how he wanted to get a job with a combat battalion—even LRPs would be better than driving an ambulance. He was tired of being called out for sprained ankles, sunburns, and barbed-wire cuts. Even worse than the routine duty was the fact that he had to wash the crackerbox after each low-priority emergency.

  Hollister looked around the inside of the ambulance. The interior was spotless, and all of its painted surfaces seemed to have a coat of wax.

  Reaching a major intersection in the center of the base camp, the MP directing traffic gave a confusing and somewhat stylized flip of the wrist that made no sense to the medic.

  “What’s that mean?”

  The MP whistled at the ambulance and put his hands on his hips. “Hey, dumbfuck! You gonna move that thing or park it?”

  The medic stuck his head out the window and yelled back, “Hey, man, who died and left you in charge of Vietnam?”

  The furious MP walked to the driver’s side of the ambulance. He pulled out his pad and glared at the driver. “Let me see your operator’s permit and your trip ticket, wiseass.”

  “What do you want it for?” the medic asked. “You gonna give me a DR for not bein’ able to read sign language, man?”

  “You’re out of uniform.”

  “Out of uniform?” the medic said, mocking the MP. “This is fuckin’ Vietnam, man. I been in this sweatbox since I got up this morning.”

  The MP started filling out the delinquency report form.

  Hollister had already had his fill of rear-echelon attitude. He leaned toward the driver’s side. “Something bothering you, Specialist?”

  The MP squatted and peered into the cab. He could only see the Infantry officer’s branch insignia on the left collar of Hollister’s fatigue shirt—not his rank. So he safe-sided his response. “Oh, good day, sir. This soldier is out of uniform. It’s against Division policy to operate a vehicle without a shirt or headgear on unless it interferes with the safe operation of the vehicle.”

  “I instructed this soldier to take his shirt off. He looked like he was going to suffer a heat injury if he didn’t. Now, we are on our way to the dispensary. If you hold us up any longer, it might not be so good for him.”

  The MP knew that he was being outranked, and didn’t want the trouble it would take to match authority with the officer in the ambulance. “In that case, sir, I think y’all ought to be on your way.”

  The MP stepped back from the vehicle and saluted.

  The medic smiled broadly, jammed it in gear and drove off.

  CHAPTER 21

  LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, THE Division hospital was covered with dust. A clerk at the Admissions and Disposition desk directed Hollister back outside the hospital headquarters tent to the ward that held Kerry French.

  Kerry’s ward was made up of four tents that had been butted together in a cross. As he approached it, Hollister felt a tightening in his chest.

  Inside, a medic pointed Hollister to the nursing station at the intersection of the four tents. There, a seated nurse flanked by two piles of medical records pointed the blunt end of a pencil toward a bed at the near end of a tent. Hollister had been in enough army hospitals to know that the beds closest to the nurse’s stations were reserved for patients who needed the most care.

  As he walked around the nursing station and into the other wing, Hollister didn’t recognize Kerry. Still, it was the right bed.
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br />   Kerry was facing away from him, so Hollister had a moment to take it all in. Kerry was on a real hospital bed; others in the ward were on simple army cots.

  His body was contorted into an extremely uncomfortable-looking position. Cables drew tension against his legs, and a plastic corset braced his torso from hips to armpits. In a cast, one arm was raised at an awkward angle, supported by a brace. Tubes led from under the sheet that covered him to plastic bags hung below, from the frame of the bed. One held urine with evidence of blood in it; the other seemed to be a drain of mostly blood. Kerry’s head was bandaged, and one eye was completely covered with dressings. Hanging from a stand, containers of saline solution and other medications were dripping through tubes to his free forearm.

  Hollister walked around the bed to be in his friend’s field of vision. “Kerry?” he said tentatively. “It’s me, man. Jim Hollister.”

  Kerry turned his head with much difficulty. He smiled.

  Hollister tried not to wince. A stomach tube was stuck out of Kerry’s nose. Several teeth were missing and others were chipped off at the gum line. He leaned over and touched Kerry’s hand. “How ya doing?”

  “Oh … I guess I’m okay. Won’t be dancing anytime soon. But what are you doing here?”

  Hollister suddenly realized that his visit might alarm Kerry. He decided to tell a white lie. “Had to come up here to find out about the Cav’s Aerial Rocket Artillery. I asked around and was told that you were here.”

  Kerry smiled again. “That’s great. I’m glad I didn’t miss you. They’re sending me home soon.” His voice was thick from the painkillers.

  “That’s good. But how did this happen? You in a firefight or what?”

  Kerry formed another crooked smile and uttered what sounded like a laugh modulated to keep from hurting himself. “Wish it were something that heroic. Damn chopper crash. I was on a recon in a Huey with my CO and the Artillery FO and we lost it. All of a sudden we were falling out of the sky.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?” Hollister asked.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty dry. Could you get me some ice?”