by Dennis Foley
He also couldn’t help but notice that Pascoe’s uniforms had been tailored to fit him perfectly. Scotty’s was baggy and still wrinkled from being packed in Jake’s duffel bag. Pascoe’s fatigues were starched and ironed, fresh from one of the small laundries he had seen outside the compound walls along the roadway to the Sugar Mill.
Pascoe’s words suddenly grabbed Scotty’s full attention. “… and when Sergeant Caruthers leaves you will be my senior NCO. I’ll be expecting you to set the example for every Vietnamese soldier you come into contact with. I will accept nothing less.”
“Pardon me, sir. Isn’t there a replacement for Sergeant Caruthers? I mean, someone other than me?”
Pascoe frowned, interrupted his own welcoming lecture and looked toward the ceiling. “No. No, there isn’t. And this is no small point of aggravation for me.” He jabbed his index finger at his own chest. “I’m trying to show our counterparts how important planning is for the smooth transition when replacements are needed and MACV Headquarters can’t even find a single Sergeant First Class to replace Caruthers.
“Just let me worry about that. Until then, I’m going to expect a lot from you. I want you to spend the few days you have left with Caruthers picking his brain and learning the ropes. You’ll have his job soon enough.”
Caruthers’ job. Scotty felt the sweat running down the hollow in his throat. How could he take over from a soldier who had spent thirty years in the Army? He hadn’t even completely unpacked yet.
Pascoe wrapped up his welcome making sure Scotty understood his priorities and his concerns and his cautions. All of which were not to do anything that would reflect badly on Pascoe.
Caruthers dumped a cardboard box upside down over Scotty’s bunk. Boxes of ammunition, fiberboard hand grenade containers, two hand-held flares, and a couple of flashlight batteries piled up on the mattress. “There you go, John Wayne. Everything you need to kick some Viet Cong ass, son.”
Scotty felt his chest tighten. His first real combat patrol. All his training had come down to the day he’d actually face someone bent on killing him.
“Get y’er shit together, young sergeant.” Caruthers looked at his GI watch. “You got about two hours. I’ll be issuing the patrol order at eighteen hundred hours in the briefing room. Don’t be late. Major P will be there and he don’t like it if anybody’s late.
“I’m goin’ to find some of that fuckin’ god-awful Viet coffee. Come git me if you need me.” He started to step out of the room and stopped. Reaching in the side cargo pocket he pulled out a pouch of Redman Chewing Tobacco and threw it to Scotty. “You buy your own on our next PX run when we get back from this ambush.”
Scotty caught the paper pouch and looked at it. He hoped he’d be back to do that.
Scotty rigged and rerigged his gear. Counting his canvas rucksack, his web belt that held much of his ammo and grenades, his two canteens and his rifle he’d be carrying eighty pounds—more than half again his own weight.
He ran over the checklist he had scratched on a cardboard flap torn from a box of rifle ammunition with a pencil too hard to avoid tearing the paper. He had it all: ammo, rations, water, compass, map, notebook, ball point pen, grease pencils, water purification tablets, malaria pills and his patrol cap. He slipped the harness of his web gear over his shoulders, grabbed his rucksack by the frame and his rifle in his other hand and looked around the room. On the window ledge was his only snapshot of Eileen. He wanted to take it with him but knew it would be destroyed by the swamps and streams along the patrol route. He paused to look at it for a moment. Eileen smiling at the camera, the Florida breeze blowing her hair. He felt heavy in the center of his chest.
“As y’all know, this is an eight-man ambush patrol. We’ll be looking for VC infiltrating in one and two-man teams from Cambodia into country and through the division area of operations on to Saigon.” Caruthers rocked back on his heels and then forward to his toes. He held a white wooden pointer with a red painted tip parallel to the dirt floor of the briefing room.
He turned and tapped a spot on the map tacked to the wall. “This is our ambush site along this canal that draws water off the Vam Co Dong River for irrigation. We’ve seen lots of trails meetin’ up at this point here and Intel reports tell us that it’s the first source of decent drinking water the VC come to in-country.”
As Caruthers spoke, Scotty looked around the room from his chair near the wall. Six Vietnamese soldiers sat in a semi-circle in front of Caruthers. He had met none of them before. All had come from the Division Reconnaissance Platoon. The fact that they had all volunteered reassured Scotty after all the stories he had heard about South Vietnamese being extremely reluctant warriors.
On the far end of the curved row of folding chairs Major Pascoe sat squarely, his arms crossed over his chest.
Scotty listened to Caruthers who expertly delivered as good a patrol order as he’d heard since being drafted. Caruthers would pause every few sentences and a soldier in the middle, a sergeant by the rank on his shirt, quietly translated for his fellow Vietnamese who didn’t speak English.
Going into combat for the first time and with soldiers who didn’t even speak his language added to Scotty’s level of anxiety. He felt the sweat trickle from his breastbone to his navel and realized that it was time—his first patrol briefing for his first real ambush.
In a matter of minutes he’d be outside the Sugar Mill’s compound where everyone had to be considered the enemy. He looked at the bright square the setting sun threw on the wall as it poured through the only glassless window in the room. He tried to take a deep breath and let it out without anyone noticing.
Stuffing the small GI notebook into the pocket of his jungle fatigues, Scotty looked across the compound in the direction of that night’s ambush. The sweat he built up in the briefing room began running down his chest from his neck and as quickly began to cool from the light breeze slipping gently out of Cambodia to the west. Scotty’s mind filled with the sudden reality: he still had plenty to do before the patrol.
He flipped his wrist to check his watch. Two hours and he would be outside the concertina wire. The real thing. It seemed to him it had been a long time coming—the training, studying, practicing and preparing for the first time he would really be in harm’s way. The first time he would face someone intent on killing him. He couldn’t remember when anything had felt so serious to him. Not since his first parachute jump at Airborne School had he felt such an overpowering sense of responsibility for how things would come out. He could do it right or he could screw it up. That much he had learned.
He found himself ticking off the last minute details of what he had to do to get ready for the ambush patrol—a process drilled into him in Ranger School. But his first urge was to find some time to finish a short letter to Eileen he had started earlier. And to get one off to Kitty. Even if only a few words for each.
“Hayes!”
Scotty heard his name over the sounds of the road traffic outside the compound and recognized Pascoe’s voice. He turned and saluted simultaneously. “Yes, sir?”
“You ready, Sergeant?”
“To go, sir? He nodded toward the front gate of the compound. “Not yet, but I will be.”
Pascoe gave him a smile making Scotty feel a bit uneasy with its sincerity. “With Caruthers leaving soon I’m going to be expecting a whole lot out of you, Hayes. We have a big job to do here”
Scotty wasn’t sure if Pascoe expected an answer, and if he did, what would be appropriate. He tried something neutral. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Let’s walk,” Pascoe said, pointing toward the mess hall.
Scotty took up a place to Pascoe’s left—as was the custom when walking with a superior. He found himself in step with Pascoe in less than three strides.
Pascoe looked around as if to make sure they weren’t being overheard. “You see, Hayes, we set the tone around here. I don’t have to tell you how slow these Viets can be at getting their asses in
gear. So everything you do has to be the way we want them to operate. I expect you to be the first to fight, the first to show them the way we do things. Lead by example. They’ll be watching you. You drag butt, so will they. The Army sent us here to put some fire in their asses and some wins in the scoreboard.
“If we’re going to create a reputation as a division known for kicking ass it starts with you and me. I want to see you come back here with scalps every time you go outside the wire with the Viets. You got me?”
Scotty nodded and uttered a yes with just enough conviction to keep Pascoe from thinking he wasn’t on the team.
Pascoe patted Scotty on the shoulder. “Good, good. I knew I could count on you.” He then turned and walked away, toward the operations office, without so much as a goodbye or good luck.
Scotty watched Pascoe’s stride. It was as if he knew people were watching him walk across the compound.
“Watch your back.”
Scotty turned to find Caruthers standing in the doorway to the mess hall. “What’s that, Sarge?”
Before he spoke again, Caruthers stuck his finger in his mouth and pulled out a plug of chewing tobacco. He dropped it onto the ground and pushed it into the dirt with his boot. “Listen, boy. I’m just an old ground pounder and I don’t know much about much.” He looked up under the brim of his patrolling cap at Pascoe entered the headquarters. “But I know you better keep your eye on that guy. Don’t know why. And I ain’t been around him all that much. He’s kind of a ghost. He never comes out of his office, never seems to be ’round trainin’ much and I don’t think he’s been on any a’ our operations. Wherever he’s keepin’ himself and whatever he’s doing, I wouldn’t turn my back on him. If you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Scotty said. He turned from Pascoe to Caruthers. “I hear you, Sarge. He has a real funny way of saying we when he means me. We got to do this. And we got to do that.”
“Yeah, he does that a lot with me too. Oh, hey… I got something for you.” Caruthers reached down into the cargo pocket on the leg of his jungle fatigues and pulled out an envelope striped with an Air Mail red, white and blue border and waved it.
Scotty stepped closer and took the letter, quickly searching for a sign of its writer. Eileen’s name in blurred ink filled the lines printed for the return address. He burst into a broad smile. “Thanks, Sarge. I’ve been waiting for this.” He didn’t wait for a response but quickly slipped his finger under the flap, opened the envelope and pulled out the small onion skin pages. He spread them with is fingers to see there were three pages—all in beautifully handwritten fountain pen ink.
Caruthers reopened the screen door to the mess hall. “Well, I can see I’ve ’bout lost your attention, young sergeant.”
Scotty looked up quickly from his letter. “Oh, sorry, Sarge.” He waved the pages. “My girl. First letter. Since I got here. You know.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve had me lots of letters like them—Germany, Korea, Panama. You go on and read your letter. But don’t be forgettin’ we leave here pretty soon.”
Inside the NCO hootch Scotty checked his watch. An hour was all separating him from his first combat patrol. He felt it in his gut but was determined to find some time to read and savor Eileen’s words. He flopped down on his bunk letting his legs slant off to the side, avoiding the pile of combat gear he had rigged earlier. Eileen’s letter was still in his hand.
He looked at the date on the outside of the envelopes and realized it had taken twelve days for it to get to him. He’d been warned by others the turn-around time for a letter seemed like an eternity, but there was no option—no faster way of communicating. Not even phones.
Scotty touched Eileen’s handwriting and read the first line again. She was unsure if the letter would get to him soon and if it would only be read by him. She’d never known anyone else in Vietnam but remembered reading letters were censored in World War II.
He reminded himself to tell her in his letter no one would read her letters but him. He wanted to encourage her to be as candid and as intimate as he could.
She spoke of Kitty’s health seeming to improve sometimes for days only to suffer a setback. And she cautioned Scotty shouldn’t worry because she would watch out for Kitty as if she were her own mother.
She quickly got around to them and how she missed him even though he had only been gone a few weeks. She had started counting the days and would remind him each letter how many days he had remaining on his tour in Vietnam.
She missed him. He stopped and read the line again. A year until he could see her seemed like such a long time. He thought of the few days they tried to fill with each other before he left, her smile, her laugh and how wonderful she smelled. The ache he felt for her was like nothing he had ever felt for any girlfriend before. She seemed to fill his head and his body reacted each time he thought of her.
He read the rest of the short letter and was disappointed to hear she had not received any of the letters he had already mailed to her. She promised to try to write him every day. He felt guilty because he had barely been able to find the time to get one out every third or fourth day because of his schedule. He made a promise to try to match her efforts.
He set aside his regrets and feelings of guilt and got onto one end of his wooden footlocker. The other end served as his desk. He wrote as quickly as he could to use the time he had to get the writing he wanted to do done.
“Hey, you goin’ to war with us? Or are you going to get all gooey over your letter, young Ranger?”
Scotty jumped at the sound of Caruthers’ voice. He looked quickly at the alarm clock near his bunk. “Damn, Sarge. I lost track of time.” He leaped to his feet and grabbed his combat gear and his rifle. He folded Eileen’s letter to take it with him.
Caruthers pointed at the letter still in his hand. “Better leave it here.”
“I can’t take it with me?” Scotty asked.
“I ’spose. If you want to turn it into a gob of wet paper and runny ink. This is as dry as you gonna’ be for some time. It’s your call, boy.”
Digging into his shirt pocket, Scotty found his ball point pen and put the tip of it down the barrel of his carbine he held between knees. There was no getting away from the roiling dust cloud slipping over the tailgate and powdered everyone inside. Aside from the discomfort, grit down the barrel of his rifle could cause it to jam when he most needed it.
Customary for military transport in Vietnam, the deuce and a half truck they rode in had the canvas cover over the bed of the truck rolled up on the bows to provide shade but still allow the riders in the back to see out. The floor was covered with filled sandbags in the event they drove over a mine—sandbags to absorb the blast and some of the fragmentation.
The six Vietnamese soldiers sat in pairs, chatting—as if there was no war, no Viet Cong, no possibility of a land mine or ambush or someone rushing by on a motor bike to toss a grenade into the back of the moving truck. All of these possibilities crossed Scotty’s mind as he kept his eyes on the activities ahead of the truck and along side the dirt roadway.
Scotty sat next to Caruthers and quietly spoke. “How come the Major ain’t coming with us?”
Caruthers laughed. “You shittin’ me? The major on a patrol. That’s rich!”
“No way, huh?”
“You can put money on never seein’ his ass out here humpin’ a rucksack or getting uncomfortable with the little people.” Caruthers spit a stream of chewing tobacco juice out over the side of the truck bed. “I seen lots like him before. You know, the ‘You go on out there and kill a Commie for me’ kind.
“In all the time he’s been here I ain’t never seen him outside the wire ’cept’n when he and Minh are flying over the war at nearly fifteen hundred feet.”
Scotty took his eyes off the villagers clogging the edges of the narrow roadway on their way home. He looked at his watch. 1900 hours, seven p.m. civilian time. It was just starting to get dark. He thought of home again. It was seven
in the morning the next day in Florida. Eileen would be on her way to Kitty’s. Scotty suddenly realized how other-worldly America seemed from the back of the truck on his way to his first combat operation.
After another twenty minutes of driving at a snail’s pace they stopped. Figures inside the bed of the truck were only somewhat blacker than the night when the driver finally stopped along side the road. “This is our stop, young sergeant,” Caruthers voice announced from the darkness.
Before Scotty could reply he jumped at the sound of a loud metal clanging caused by one of the Vietnamese soldiers who had unhooked the tailgate and let it slam open against the chassis of the truck.
“Well, if they didn’t know we were comin’ before, it’s fuckin’ sure they know now,” Caruthers said. He punctuated his irritation by spitting a long stream of tobacco juice out into the ditch along side the roadway.
“No shit. What now?” Scotty asked.
“We’ll get off the road, let the vehicle go back and see if we can get some decent night vision after the truck headlights are gone. Let’s go. Out.”
After too much milling around and confusion in the dark to suit Scotty’s standards the patrol got into its march formation.
Scotty wasn’t comfortable with the eight members of the patrol tightly clustered and crouched in a ditch not ten feet from the roadway—now abandoned after dark because of the risk of traveling at night in Viet Cong controlled areas.
The sound of the truck’s engine faded and Scotty came to the full reality of his situation. It was the day he had known would come from the minute he got orders to Vietnam. From that moment on he could be shot at, wounded, maimed or killed. While the thought was disturbing he was most concerned with how he would react when the shooting actually started. Would he be able to hold his head up after it was over? Would fear grip him so tightly he would freeze up? Would he embarrass and shame himself? The more he thought about it, the tighter the knot in his gut. He realized his mouth was dry and he was perspiring even though he wasn’t even moving yet.