by Dennis Foley
He rolled over to the margins of the thick weedy hedge concealing them and parted the leaves enough to look out in the direction of the Sugar Mill.
What he saw surprised him. Traffic. People. Walking. He could see tiny motor scooters and miniature ox carts moving barely three miles ahead of him along a dirt roadway hugging the bank of a river running generally north and south. It had to be the Vam Co Dong River—the one the Sugar Mill was built on. He couldn’t see anything looking like the Sugar Mill, but he could see small, single story buildings of stucco and thatch—hamlets—South Vietnamese hamlets.
If they could get there. If they could only get to that river without being caught, shot or tripping a booby trap, they would survive. They could get help. He and Nguyen could get much needed medical attention. If only he could get them across the final three miles of dangerous open ground.
He looked for available way stations where they could hide out, as they had done since leaving the border. There were none in a direct line from where he hid to the closest point on the path following the river. There were some to the north and some to the south. To take advantage of them would mean covering almost half again as much distance to get to them just to hide in them.
Scotty looked back at his map and had a better idea of where they were, now that he could see a turn in the river ahead of him. Excited, he turned to Nguyen. “Dai Uy. Look. Here.” He pointed in the direction of the river.
Nguyen could hardly raise his head. The strength he needed to move to Scotty seemed outside his reach.
It was certain now, Scotty really needed to move faster. He needed to get this man to help before the infection killed him. He crawled over to Nguyen. “Can I drag you over here to look? Can you just tell me what I’m seeing is what I’m seeing?”
The captain nodded weakly.
“Don’t move. Let me.” Scotty hooked his hands under Nguyen’s arms and slid him to at point where he too could see through the vegetation at the people walking, unafraid, unarmed but with a purpose to places important to them.
Nguyen’s eyes kept closing, as if he didn’t have the strength to stay awake. He fought the urge to let his body take him into restful sleep and looked in the direction Scotty was pointing. He seemed to smile, ever so slightly, and said something Scotty couldn’t quite hear.
“What? What did you say?” Scotty asked, putting his ear only inches from Nguyen’s lips.
“An Ninh…”
“An Ninh? Did you say An Ninh? Scotty asked.
Nguyen nodded affirmatively and closed his eyes.
An Ninh, Scotty ran his finger up the river depicted on his map and found it—An Ninh. It was a small village not more than a mile north of the Sugar Mill. He remembered driving through there. He remembered there was a major roadway through it. He’d been there. He’d just never seen its skyline from that angle.
Excited, Scotty turned to Nguyen to share the good news he’d confirmed on his map only to find him asleep. He reached over and felt his skin again. It was burning.
Scotty pulled his cravat from around his neck, soaked in the swamp water, wrung it out and placed it on Nguyen’s throat—next to his jugular hoping to help cool him down.
He looked at his watch. It was getting late. He had to make a decision quickly. He knew if he carried Nguyen the rest of the way, as weak as he was himself, it would take them three more days—at least. Where would they hold up during the daylight? He had no good options.
But he might be able to make it by himself in half that time, get some help and come back. He knew the decision was his to make. Nguyen wouldn’t be able to discuss it with him. And even if he could, what would be the point? He had learned a lot about the little captain in their time together. He was incredibly brave, stoic and unselfish. He would surely argue for being left behind.
Scotty would do it. But what needed to be done first? He couldn’t just walk off and leave Nguyen. He needed to put a plan together to leave Nguyen with whatever Nguyen might need. Once that was done, he needed to move fast.
Before he made any final decision and made arrangements to leave he needed some rest. He knew it was dangerous to try to get some sleep while Nguyen was sleeping, but he couldn’t wait for the captain to wake up and spell him. Even if he did wake up, how long could he stay awake. Scotty had to take the chance. He propped himself up against a small stand of pygmy bamboo and rested his rifle across his knees. He desperately needed to rest, but he also needed to be very vigilant and use his hearing to warn them of the approach of anyone while he tried to rest.
He closed his eyes and listened. The air was still, birds were chirping at a distance and insects chimed in. Then he heard it. Choppers. He heard helicopters. Not close and not coming their way, but close enough to hear. He was that close to safety but still in grave danger.
Pascoe was pleased he had been able to convince General Duong to go along with his new plan to pay for information from previously uncooperative villagers and then exploit the information to concentrate their ambushes on the most likely enemy infiltration routes. The plan still needed to be blessed by MACV. It would be US money they would spend. That meant convincing General Devlen of the promise the plan offered. He knew he’d have to put on a good sales pitch. He was pleased with the content of his briefing, but he was far from patient with his new senior sergeant. “Goddamn it, Jackson. Stay with me!”
Sergeant Jackson stood between a large paper easel with a list of points written on the attached pad in large block letters and the tactical map covered by acetate and marked with areas of interest Pascoe was referring to.
Pascoe stood nearby at a plywood podium off to the side of the visuals Jackson was pointing out with a long white pointer and picked up his place in the prepared text he was reading.
Both men faced an empty briefing room with the chairs arranged neatly in rows and GI butt cans made from empty coffee cans painted red, filled with a few inches of water and placed on wooden stands every three chairs.
Pascoe read a sentence from his text and then looked over at Jackson to see if he was pointing to the place on the map or the point on the bulleted list Pascoe was referring to. “We are going to rehearse this until it is letter perfect. I don’t care if we have to do it twenty times. When I say something requiring you to point it out, I want you to do so without hesitation and without error. You got me, Sergeant?”
“Yessir,” the sergeant replied, large ovals of perspiration staining the armpits of his uniform becoming evident each time he extended his arm to point.
“And I want you in a fresh uniform when we brief General Devlen. You hear me?”
“Yessir.”
Pascoe gathered up his text, flipped it over to the first page and began again, speaking to the empty chairs.
“General Devlen, General Duong, distinguished visitors, welcome to the 6th Infantry Division headquarters. This morning’s briefing is to familiarize you with the division’s plan to increase its effectiveness to interdict enemy movement through the area of operations and gain your support and the resources necessary to gain the desired results…”
They went through the entire twenty minute briefing four more times and Pascoe told Jackson to plan on doing it again the next day—until it was perfect.
Chapter 23
IT TOOK MUCH OF THE AFTERNOON for Scotty to gather enough dry leaves and grasses to make a nest for Captain Nguyen. Scotty picked the highest spot inside the stubby trees to reduce the chance the water would rise and swamp Nguyen and to increase the chance any new rains would quickly run off and away from him keeping him as dry as possible.
After helping the weakened and feverish Nguyen onto the bed he had made, Scotty began covering him with more leaves until he had made a blanket. It would help reflect his body heat and keep Nguyen warm during the cold nights and rains he would surely face while Scotty was gone.
He left his canteens filled and within reach. He could drink out of the paddies and streams along the way.
&
nbsp; In a canteen cup, Scotty left rice they had come across, softened in water and made into a pasty mush. In a second cup he placed fingerlings and two freshwater prawns for Nguyen.
Scotty checked his carbine to make sure it was loaded and operating smoothly. He emptied his pockets of the three remaining twenty-round magazines and put them in Nguyen’s shirt pocket where he could get at them easily. He finally rested the rifle across the captain’s thighs.
Nothing needed to be said between them. The fact he was leaving his rifle with Nguyen reinforced their understanding about their relative vulnerabilities. If Nguyen were to be found, he would have to defend himself as long as his could hold out. If Scotty were to be discovered in his last efforts to cross the paddies to get help he would be unlikely to win a shoot out with more than one Viet Cong. And he was unlikely to run into only one enemy soldier. For him, a rifle would just slow him down and might cause him to be mistaken for a Viet Cong soldier. Any South Vietnamese soldier wouldn’t think a lone figure walking through that area with a rifle would be an American. He would protect himself with Nguyen’s pistol but keep it concealed in his shirt.
Sitting back on his heels, Scotty looked at Nguyen. “What am I forgetting, Dai Uy?”
“I be good here. You go.”
“You gonna’ be okay?”
“Yes. You go.”
Scotty stood and looked directly into Nguyen’s eyes, even though it was not done in the captain’s culture. “I promise you I will come back to get you. I promise.”
Nguyen smiled, his voice weak, “Yes. I know.”
His feet hurt from days of exposure, constant immersion in water and cutting fibers of roots and small rocks each time his bare feet sliced into the mud. The speed Scotty had hoped to pick up by not carrying Nguyen was offset by his continuing deterioration. The spiking fevers and joint pains had been accompanied by ever increasing back pains, nausea and pounding headaches. He even experienced pain when he moved his eyes. Pain which compounded the severity of his headaches.
He had been moving for an hour when he felt another wave of nausea and the urge to vomit. He knew this was the worst. It was almost impossible to vomit quietly.
Luckily, it had started to rain again. The rain was chilling and helped cover the retching sounds. On his hands and knees he tried to vomit into his own foot prints to cover up some of the evidence he had passed that way and make it a bit easier by only having to shove mud into the hole rather than dig one.
Closer to midnight Scotty simply had to sit down. His legs couldn’t hold him up. He’d been staggering for almost two hours when he did stop.
As he sat in the middle of an old rice paddy, too tired to move to a nearby dike which might offer some added concealment, the water covered his legs up to a point just below his navel. Though feverish, he began to shiver, rain pounding on his head and neck and plopping loudly in the paddy water. He thought of Nguyen and wondered if he was doing okay or if the rain was as bone chilling for him. He hoped the blanket of leaves he had prepared for him helped him hold the little body heat he had left.
Ahead, Scotty could see the tiny lights from lamps and lanterns in the houses along the far bank of the river. In the rain and the dark it was hard for him to tell how far away they were. He couldn’t tell if he would have to walk yet another night to reach the river’s edge.
He had never felt so exhausted. Nor had he ever felt such little confidence in what he had to do. He shivered violently and considered his options. If he got back up and continued he could count on the effort to move to warm him up. But what if that same effort proved to be too much and he found himself collapsing before reaching help? He promised Nguyen. He thought of Eileen and Kitty.
It took considerable effort to get from sitting to standing and then walking again. But he did it. As he walked, each step more painful and more demanding than the last, he heard Ace Russell’s voice in his head. “What’s wrong with you, boy? You some kind of sissy or something? Get your ass moving soldier or I’ll put a boot in it for you.” He hoped Russell’s night was going better than his.
A few steps and he began hearing his own words though they were barely audible. “You can do this, Hayes. You can do this. Just pick up your foot and put it down. You can do it…”
He had no idea what time it was and didn’t want to look at his watch. It was still dark. He had to keep moving as long as it was dark. As long as he could walk.
Suddenly, Scotty felt himself falling forward. Damn! He had tripped over something and was falling. The ground was going to hurt. He was sure of that. With the aches in his muscles and joints, the impact would hurt. Jump School flashed through his head. Falling was falling. Hitting the ground was all the same, with or without a parachute. He tried to twist his torso to expose the same body parts he would use making a parachute landing fall—calves, thighs, buttocks, pushup muscles…. But he never got that far and the ground never happened.
He landed in a small stream with an awkward splash. It was moving water. Water jetted up his nose and made him gag. He snapped his head up to get some air and clear his mouth and throat and found himself floating. Floating! Floating in the general direction of the river. It was a tributary feeding the river he wanted to reach. He had tripped over a dike holding the water on its course.
Scotty searched below the water’s surface with his hands and found the stream was two feet deep and about as wide as he could reach with both arms extended. The sides of the stream were exposed roots he could use to navigate his drifting and help keep him from dragging bottom.
The help in moving was what he needed to overcome his flagging endurance, but the water chilled him to the core. The rain fed the stream which moved even faster the closer he got to the river—and the water got much colder too.
He decided to stay in the water as long as he could stand it then get out and warm up by walking along the bank. Once the walking became too taxing, he would get back in the streambed. At least, that was the plan.
Scotty was very disappointed in his ability to stand the cold. He’d been in the water for half an hour before he couldn’t stop his teeth from chattering. He grabbed some roots below the water line to stop, pulled his legs up under him to a kneeling position with difficulty. He crawled to the stream bank and fell over its edge, rolling into the adjacent paddy, completely exhausted. He laid there in the mud half submerged the rain pounding him in the face and rolling off into his ears.
He knew he had to go on. He wanted so badly to sleep, to find some warmth and just sleep. He knew sleep would kill him. He would drown in the paddy water or be discovered once at sun up. He started yelling at himself in his head. Get up, Ranger. What’s wrong with you? You some kind of pansy, Ranger? Roll your ass over and get up. Now, Ranger! People are counting on you, Hayes.
On his stomach, pain stabbed his lower back as he fought to keep his face out of the water. He had to get up. Getting on all fours was extremely painful, but he did it. Once there, he rested for the next move. He sucked up as much air as he could hoping to flood his muscles with the oxygen he needed. He had to get up. He had to move.
He found the strength somewhere and got to his feet again. Unsteady, dizzy and still shivering, he took a step. Then the next. And the next.
It was still dark when Pascoe left the mess hall with a cup of coffee in hand. He had learned many years earlier the lesson of any classroom or briefing. If you don’t rehearse and check on all your training aids you are sure to find something missing, wrong or out of place when it is time for the briefing. With Generals Pham and Devlen coming that day to hear the plan he and General Duong had put together, he would not be embarrassed by being unprepared. There was still time for one more rehearsal.
The only bright spot in Pascoe’s day was finding Sergeant Jackson and Major Laury waiting for him in the briefing room. “Jackson,” he said, a clear tone of displeasure in his voice.
The portly sergeant leaped to his feet from a folding chair in the front row. “Yessir?�
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“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Sir?”
“The sun isn’t even up yet and you are sweating like a pig. Look at your uniform,” Pascoe said, moving close enough to Jackson to make him lean back.
“Sir, it’s hot here.”
“By now you should be acclimatized and not look like a bag of wet rags. Remember, I want you in a fresh uniform before we start the briefing. You got that?”
The sergeant nodded his head and avoided eye contact with Pascoe. “Yes sir. I’ll do that.”
“Now,” he turned to Laury, “let’s get started. Major, I want you to sit in General Devlen’s chair and raise your hand every time I say something and Jackson here doesn’t point to exactly the right point on the charts or map. Have you got that?”
Laury guarded his expression, moved to the general’s chair and replied, “Yessir. I’ve got it.”
Pascoe took the podium, pointed at the spot where he expected Jackson to be and began reading his briefing text while the sergeant took his position.
He could hear the thunder in the black boiling clouds which had passed over him earlier and were now many miles inside Cambodia. Throwing his arms out to his side to steady himself and keep from falling, Scotty looked up for a sign of dawn. On the horizon he could see a thin line of pink separating the dark night sky from the broken horizon now dotted for him with hamlets and villages.
The river he fought to reach was still a mile off and he needed to move faster to get there before being discovered walking through the dangerous no-man’s land. He knew it meant getting back into the freezing stream swelled that much more by the rains over the past three hours.
The water was colder than before. New rain, new runoff and the increased speed of the current chilled him within seconds of returning to the stream. He would have to move faster to beat the sunrise and generate some heat deep in his torso. He reached down and grabbed handfuls of roots on the bottom of the stream and increased his speed by pulling himself along, aided by the current.