by Dennis Foley
He continued to search the other side of the chopper and the less damage he found the more concerned he became. Other than the death of Minh, there was no evidence they had actually been involved in intense enemy fire or they had been the target of very much shooting. In short, there was little to support a decision to abort the extraction and return to the Sugar Mill. How could he explain returning? How could he explain not holding on the ground long enough to pick up the stranded soldiers? He tried to control is sense of panic. There had to be a way.
It came to him. He knew how dangerous it was. Pascoe pulled the pistol from his holster and stood back from the chopper. He picked out a spot on the fuselage unlikely to be critical to flight and fired a shot into it. That would do it. He would make the chopper look like it had been through far more intense combat. They needed to see how truly volatile the landing had been. He found another spot on the nose and fired again, and another aim point on one of the skids and fired a hole in it.
He emptied his pistol into the non-critical parts of the chopper and followed that up with half his carbine magazine. He wanted to save some ammunition should he need it later.
The strip of trees was no more than twenty feet wide but was almost thirty meters long. Scotty crawled from side to side to get a feel for how large their small sanctuary was. He discovered the stand of brush had once been planted to provide a weather break for the adjacent but long since abandoned rice paddies. In the years since the farmers had left the land the original trees had been joined by a tough and wiry cluster of thorny weed-like bushes which concealed him and Nguyen from view.
Scotty could see east and west from the narrow axis of the tree stand, but he and Nguyen were virtually blind to anything north and south because what concealed them also obscured their view.
Scotty returned to Nguyen, reported what he had found and asked him if he had a plan.
Nguyen reached for the radio and Scotty shook his head to let him know it was useless. “Okay. We wait.”
The word okay sounded awkward coming out of Captain Nguyen’s mouth, but he was right. Nguyen’s informal tone was for a definite purpose—to inspire confidence.
Still, they had no other choice. They were concealed and unless the Viet Cong had seen them slip into the tree stand they would be good there until choppers from division returned to pull them out again. Surely they would do that. And they wouldn’t want to confuse the returning pilots by moving to another more distant location and not being able to tell them with no working radio.
Unaware of Minh’s death, Scotty trusted there was a reason Minh and Pascoe aborted the pickup before he and Nguyen could reach the chopper. And he was sure they would return.
Their only problem, other than being discovered, was not being able to speak to the choppers and guide them to their location. Scotty knew they would have to figure out a way to signal the pilots when they returned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two packs of GI matches. If he could dry them out he could use them to start a fire. They would be useful at night or if it was overcast. He still had his signal mirror around his neck to get a chopper’s attention in daylight.
Nguyen recognized what Scotty was doing and the two began breaking small branches off the trees and the thicket to be ready to start when the next rescue attempt started.
Certain he couldn’t wait longer for the weather to clear and still be able to explain where he had been and why he had not been reachable on the chopper’s radio, Pascoe climbed back into the aircraft and restarted it.
He watched the instruments carefully to make sure he hadn’t done any serious damage to the flight systems while firing rounds into the aircraft.
As quickly as he fired up the chopper his helmet headset came alive with radio calls from Operations for him to reply. He decided to ignore the calls until he go the chopper safely into the air.
His anxieties over making a pinnacle landing were matched by his uncertainty about taking off from the mountain top at night in the rain. He put the chopper in motion and found it responsive and his skills adequate to get it off the peak of Nui Ba Den and into straight and level flight en route to the Sugar Mill.
Once in the air he found the ceiling too low to offer him much visibility in the direction of the Sugar Mill. He maneuvered the chopper over the main north-south highway running from Tay Ninh to the Sugar Mill and followed its path at a dangerously low altitude.
No longer able to ignore the radio calls he pressed the transmit button and reestablished communication with the radio operator at the Sugar Mill. He quickly explained away the half hour of silence by claiming the weather had been severe enough between them that while he had heard most of their calls he was unable to overcome the radio interference created inside the nearby thunderstorms to understand or reply.
The radio operator asked him where he wanted the gunships and pickup choppers to rendezvous to rescue the remaining troops on the ground.
Pascoe hesitated then replied, “Turn them around if they have already lifted off. There are no survivors. I say again, there is no one to pickup.” He paused, then added, “I also have one crewmember casualty—KIA.”
There was silence on the other end of the radio. Pascoe could only guess the radio operator knew what the obscure reference meant—the only other crewmember in Pascoe’s chopper was Minh. And he was dead.
The radio operator came alive again in Pascoe’s headset and responded with a simple reply in broken English, “Roger.” Pascoe rescanned his instruments, checked his fuel level and followed the roadway below now more aware of the dead man next to him still strapped into his seat than the line he had crossed with his explanation. He blocked the ultimate violation of the oath he had taken seventeen years earlier as a cadet at West Point from his mind: Cadets would not lie, cheat or steal; nor tolerate those among them who did.
In the treeline, Scotty and Captain Nguyen began to inventory their resources. They had less than fifty rounds of ammunition, two rifles, four grenades, two maps, two compasses, Tran’s medical kit and no radio.
The marshes seemed to have gone quiet save the noises of the night which somehow returned after each violent clash of soldiers and machines. They didn’t need to talk about the danger they were facing. They had to stay hidden until choppers returned to find them. Then, the hardest part would be making it from the treeline to the pickup choppers without getting cut down by enemy fire while out in the open. Then they would hope the chopper could climb out of the pickup zone without being blown out of the sky.
Pascoe went over the explanation he would have to give on arrival at the Sugar Mill as he continued to follow the road below. He would have to have his side of the story down pat. He was sure he’d be asked to repeat it many times before the night’s events would be behind him.
He convinced himself there was no chance the two soldiers on the ground could have survived after he flew away. There had been too much fire, too many Viet Cong in the area and they had been completely compromised by stepping out into the open to reach the chopper. And even if they had survived by some stroke of luck they were not only in a place where they couldn’t be rescued, they were more than likely in the hands of the Viet Cong. Prisoners—that early in the war meant impossible to rescue.
The lights were all on around the helipad at the Sugar Mill as Pascoe slowed the chopper’s forward speed to set up for his landing. As he crossed the walls he could see a reception party waiting for him on the steps of the headquarters building. Generals Pham and Devlen had obviously been notified of his arrival because of the report of Minh’s death. Next to them stood two small Vietnamese medics dutifully wearing their Red Cross marked helmets holding a folding stretcher almost twice their height.
Nearby, a crowd of Vietnamese soldiers stood in a cluster, morbidly curious to see what the chopper held.
Pascoe put the chopper onto the large H on the ground inside the compound and ran through his shutdown procedures still focused on what his demeanor should be once he
stepped from the chopper. He surely needed to be disturbed by the losses, by Minh’s death and he should make a point out of stressing how hard they tried to find and rescue the remaining soldiers out on the ground.
General Devlen stood a few strides from the chopper surveying the damage to the aircraft as Pascoe unbuckled and stepped down onto the toe of the skid to get out of the chopper. He saluted Devlen and said nothing more than a salutatory, “General.”
The general returned his salute and shook his head looking back at the shot-up chopper. “Goddamn, son. How did you get this thing to make it all the way back here without falling out of the sky?”
Not missing the opportunity to downplay it, Pascoe looked over his shoulder at the chopper and shrugged. “They are tougher birds than we think sometimes, General.”
The two medics scurried around the front of the chopper, pulled Minh’s body from his seat and placed it on the stretcher. Before they moved it, one of the soldiers took a cloth from his pocket. To Pascoe it looked to be a handkerchief or napkin. He draped the cloth reverently over the dead general’s face, as was the custom designed to keep family and friends from being shocked by the vision of the deceased.
Pascoe and Devlen stood silently as they carried the body to the dispensary on the other side of the compound. A scream broke the silence. Pascoe looked at the woman standing by the Vietnamese general’s quarters, once the home of the Sugar Mill’s owner. She was Minh’s wife. Pascoe had only met her once at a reception for the local mayor.
She broke into a run across the compound, her shoes throwing up muddy water with each stride staining the back of her white satin pants under her dark blue ao dai.
She reached the body of her fallen husband and threw herself across his chest while the two medics tried to carry their burden. It was an awkward sight as the two soldiers were unsure if their duty was to get the dead warrior’s body out of the drizzle to a more respectful place or if they should stop long enough for his widow to wail and pour out her grief for the world to hear.
“Colonel?”
Pascoe turned to find General Devlen gesturing toward the headquarters building and the Vietnamese Corps Commander standing under the overhanging porch.
“Shall we join General Pham inside? I’m sure he would like to hear how this happened,” Devlen said.
Inside the conference room the three officers sat at a large table topped with a map of the division’s area of operations. The two generals sat on one side while Pascoe sat on the other facing them. He knew whatever he said was critical to how he would be treated from then on.
General Devlen made it all that much easier for Pascoe to embellish and depart from the actual facts with his opening words. The general waved at a young soldier in the room but spoke to Pascoe. “Are you okay with us doing this now? Would you like something to drink?”
Pascoe nodded yes to both questions. “Yes sir.”
The soldier brought a bottle of Coca Cola with a tumbler and placed it near Pascoe’s elbow.
“Colonel, we understand you and General Minh made valiant attempts to extract all the members of the patrol on the border. And I want you to know General Pham and I will be sure to take steps to see that you and General Minh are appropriately recognized for your heroism in the face of such overwhelming enemy fire.
“Now, if you feel up to it, we’d like you to walk us through the events of the last twenty-four hours. We are sure there are plenty of lessons to be learned from this action. And maybe we can extract some wisdom from the losses we regret we have sustained.”
Pascoe took a sip of the drink and paused to show he was concentrating on the details as well as focusing on accuracy. He began by summarizing the initial mission of Nguyen’s patrol to recon the area near the border, sure they knew that much. Then he reached a point where he told his first lie: “… then General Minh decided it would be useful to detach a smaller patrol to get even closer to the border since the hamlet was a bit too far away and not actually on the path of the infiltrators.”
Then he added his second lie. “I was a bit surprised to find the destination he picked for the smaller patrol was just inside the Cambodian border. I asked him about it and he told me the precise location of the border was not that firm and showed up in slightly different orientation on different maps.”
General Devlen nodded his head not so much as in approval as if to tell Pascoe to go on, he was listening.
Pascoe explained the routine details of the patrol being split into a larger and smaller elements and added that after the first night without any success on the part of Nguyen and Hayes, General Minh decided to let them watch the border one more night—Pascoe’s third lie. He compounded it by adding Minh had asked him to pass his instructions through Caruthers to both parts of the split patrol. He knew his name would be somewhere on the radio log kept at the headquarters. Every transmission sent or received was carefully recorded with time and date. Not so conversations between him and his counterpart.
What went unnoticed was the fact that Pascoe didn’t ask about the other soldiers who were extracted with Caruthers.
The mud beneath Scotty was warm and clammy from his body. The night had cooled off a bit, but the parts of his clothing not immersed in the water and muck were still as wet as when he had drifted off around one in the morning.
He raised his head off his upper arm and immediately felt the stress he must have been holding in his neck through the night. It was stiff and hurt. He twisted it slowly to free it up. As he did, he felt sweat roll from his hairline above his ear back behind it and down his neck, disappearing somewhere under his collar. The day was already heating up.
Shielding his eyes with his hand, he raised up on his elbow and scanned the flat terrain around him. In some places he could see steam wafting from the mire. A mud crane attacked a stalk of some kind reaching beyond the other grasses for some sun. Scotty continued his sweep until his neck could no longer follow his eyes. He rolled over onto his stomach hearing the sucking sounds of mud reluctantly releasing his hip and the squishing sounds of his abdomen and hips settling back onto the mud speckled with grasses and living and dead bugs of several varieties.
The continuation of his scan of the terrain revealed nothing. He rolled back onto his elbows and tried to clear his head to focus on his plan for the day. His mouth was dry and his stomach growled, begging to be filled. He needed something, anything, to maintain his flagging strength if he hoped to make any progress before nightfall.
Scotty pulled his trousers up over his knees to make a quick survey of his growing number of scrapes and bites—most of which were either already infected. An ulcer on his knee had started as a scratch a few hours out of the Sugar Mill was growing worse. It was becoming a crater with a waxy looking ochre center rimmed in angry red inflammation. He prodded the flesh around it with his finger and could feel the large pillow of fluid collected under the center of the ulcer threatening to burst through the fifty-cent piece sized crust.
He tried to calculate how long they had been out. It seemed to him to be longer, but it was just short of a week since they had left the Sugar Mill. Both Scotty and Nguyen were beginning to suffer from lack of sleep, lack of food and sheer exposure to the elements. He felt extremely fatigued and couldn’t explain the pains in his joints. Scotty sat upright in the treeline, shook off the malaise and continued his inventory of bumps and bruises. The skin above his boot tops was raw from exposure to the water and dotted with the perfectly round bloody circles where leeches had attached themselves, gorged on his blood and then dropped off. Two were still searching for a place to feast. He pulled them from his leg before they got started and flicked them off into the grasses.
He looked at Nguyen who was using a small piece of rag to clean the dirt from his rifle as he kept watch on the narrow ribbon of marsh separating them from Cambodia.
Scotty looked at the same horizon searching for any sign of renewed threat. The long abandoned paddy fields were silent. Only mo
rning birds and distant roosters broke the silence as Scotty kept alert for the welcomed sounds of approaching choppers he hoped would come. He realized how much he wanted a moment away from the threat he knew waited nearby and let his mind wander to Eileen and Kitty and home. Would they ever see each other again? Was Kitty okay?
Eileen’s face formed quickly in his mind’s eye. He wanted so badly to be with her, out of the stinking thicket, away from the war and home in Belton.
He looked back in the direction of the unseen Sugar Mill for signs of helicopters. The sky was mostly clear. Gone even were the rain clouds. He hoped they might get a respite from the rain allowing the sun to dry them out and give them some relief before the next predictable rains.
With the arrival of the choppers, he could count on getting back to the Sugar Mill, to a shower, food and sleep. He let his mind drift back to Eileen while his eyes scanned the ground between them and the Viet Cong.
Pascoe left his room in the team house and walked out into the compound. His first instinct was to look at the sky to see if it would be still another day of more rain than not. But he was pleased to find the sky intermittently broken with clouds and patches of the brilliant blue Vietnam could be proud of.
He heard voices and found several young Vietnamese soldiers looking at the damaged hulk of General Minh’s chopper. They appeared to be amazed at the number of bullet hits in the chopper and fascinated with the shattered windscreen and blood covered seat where their commanding general had met his fate.
As they saw Pascoe one of them called the group of six to attention and they all saluted the American colonel as he continued on his way to the headquarters building.
Pascoe returned the salute and said good morning to the group but couldn’t bring himself to look at either the bullet riddled chopper or the ripped and bloodied seat of its now missing command pilot.
He promised himself to check on how soon the chopper would be sent to maintenance for repairs. At least there it would be out of his sight and wouldn’t remind him of the day before.