Under Fire

by Eric Meyer

  They started walking toward us, and they’d stopped firing. A man in front of me skidded to a halt, rifle pointing in my direction, but the expression on his face was all wrong. The triumph, the hatred the gloating, abruptly vanished. To be replaced by fear, and right then I heard them, helicopters landing nearby. Simultaneously, abseiled down from six hovering overhead, and I shouted at the others, “The cavalry’s here.”

  They were pushing through the foliage where the helicopters had landed to disgorge their troops. Racing through the jungle, and these guys had no shortage of bullets. So many bullets, so many American uniforms, soldiers with ammunition to waste, and the enemy stopped dead. Certain victory had been wrenched away from them in an eye blink.

  Our guys ran past into the milling enemy ranks, pushing them back to where they’d come from. Two corpsmen rushed to where Jamie’s co-pilot lay, groaning in agony. They put him on a gurney and started to carry him back, and we glanced at each other, grinning like chimpanzees. We’d come through the worst, and it was almost over.

  “That was close,” Jesse Coles murmured. A rare speech, I guess he was feeling as relieved as we were. Tam moved next to me, and what she said took me totally by surprise.

  “He was there, at the back of his fighters, shouting orders and making sure he didn’t expose himself to any bullets. You know what it means? He’s still alive.”

  Shit.

  “Tam, you could have been mistaken. The survivors are retreating, running like frightened rabbits, and they’ve left behind plenty of bodies. If he was here, he’s probably dead. And even if he isn’t dead, he’s halfway to Hanoi by now.”

  “No, he knows this territory. The Vietcong have been building this base of operations for decades, ever since the war with the French. He won’t leave this place. Can’t leave it, it’s critical to North Vietnamese planning.”

  I was about to reply when I had one of the biggest shocks of my life, and the most unwelcome. A familiar face appeared. He’d been following the incoming troops, and when he caught sight of us, he couldn’t resist a greeting. In his case, I’d call it more of a gloating.

  “Hey, guys, how’re you doing?”

  Mark Butcher, the last person I wanted to see. The man who’d come to Vietnam to get a big scoop, or was that a scalp, and so far all he’d demonstrated was his determination to get it by dishing the dirt on our soldiers. Most of the dirt he’d dumped on my head. “We were doing fine until now,” I grunted, “Don’t let us hold you up.”

  “Funnee.” He took out a notebook and pencil, “Okay, tell me how many you’ve killed so far?”

  Morgan stared at him. “You’re not serious?”

  He grinned. “Sure I am. What’s the body count?”

  Jesse grabbed him by his shirtfront. “So far, we haven’t killed any journalists, but we’re still looking.”

  He pulled himself away. “Okay, okay, I’ve heard it all before, but I’m performing a valuable service here. You should cooperate, and like I told you before, I’ll give you a good write-up in my paper.”

  Morgan shot him a look. “Mister, the only thing you can do for us is to fuck off and never come back.”

  “You’re making a big mistake.”

  “I can live with it. Get out of here. There’re plenty of men to annoy, so why don’t you go and annoy them?”

  “You’ll be hearing more about this,” he grumbled, “You can’t treat me like I’m just anybody. Back home, people read my headlines and the Pentagon takes note.”

  “Butcher, we almost got our heads shot off. Thanks to those guys who’re chasing them into the jungle, it looks like we’re gonna live a while longer. They’re the good guys doing all the fighting. Something you wouldn’t understand. You remind me of a piece of dog shit I almost stepped on once. Now get out of here.”

  He tucked his notebook away and started walking after the troops who’d raced after the Vietcong. He didn’t get far. The shooting had faded into the distance but suddenly it crescendoed with a roar of automatic fire, and the whistle and explosions of mortar shells.

  He ran back to us, his face white with terror. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

  Tam had said it. This was a major VC base area, and in addition to the troops they kept squirrelled away in the tunnels, more had been driven west during Operation Cedar Falls.

  I glanced at Morgan. “We’re not out of trouble, not yet.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. It ain’t all over.”

  Butcher glanced toward the west, where the helicopters had come down. “We should get out of here. If we go now, we can make it back to the Hueys.”

  Morgan ignored him. “We need more ammunition. They’ll have plenty in the helicopters. We can re-equip and rejoin the fight.”

  It was Butcher’s turn to get physical, and he grabbed him by his sleeve. “Listen to that shooting. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Any sane man would want out of this place while the going’s good.”

  He shook him off. “That’s the thing, we ain’t sane. We came here to do a job, and we’ll go home when it’s done. Yeager, Byrd, get your asses over to the helicopters and grab as much ammunition as they’ll give you. You’ll need magazines for the M-14s, belts for the M-60, grenades, anything they got. Even pistol ammunition, we’re all out. Go!”

  We went, running like crazy toward the dozen helicopters sitting on the ground with soldiers standing guard. One man almost took a shot at us before he saw our uniforms.

  We reached the man in charge, a Master Sergeant, and told him what we needed. He could hear the shooting getting nearer the same as we could. He and his men handed out magazines and belts of 7.62mm rounds for the M-60, and he asked if we knew what was going on.

  “Same as you. Our guys have run into a strong force of VC, and they’re fighting hard. How about grenades?”

  He handed over a box of grenades. We scooped them up and started running back. Just in time I remembered Tam. “Sergeant, would you happen to have magazines for the M-1?”

  He handed over a canvas bag. “Not much call for those .30 caliber rounds, but some of the guys still swear by them. You have four magazines in there. After that I suggest your guy switches to an M-14.”

  “I’ll tell her.” He gave me an odd look, “I meant him.”

  “Sure.”

  We raced back and distributed the ammo. Byrd gleefully threaded a belt into the M-60, and the rest of us reloaded our rifles and automatics. The first troops had fallen back and almost reached us. A captain was shouting at them to stop and form a defensive line, but frightened men were racing past him. A few stopped and hit the deck, guns pointing where they expected the enemy to appear, and further west, some of the Hueys lifted off. They were the gunships, and they hovered overhead to give us covering fire. The machine guns hammered, but in the dense jungle it was impossible to target all the VCs, who kept up a steady fusillade of fire.

  We started forward to join the other soldiers, all except Mark Butcher, and flung ourselves next to the men of the 25th who were firing repeatedly. Pouring thousands of rounds into the enemy ranks, but the enemy knew this territory well, and they had another advantage. When things looked bad, they could use the tunnels and drop out of sight.

  Somehow we hadn’t considered how they managed it, until a bunch of VCs suddenly appeared right in front of us, no more than twenty meters away. It was like a conjurer’s trick. One moment there was just jungle, and the next they were in front of us. Ten men, twenty, thirty, forty, but with reinforcements and fresh supplies of ammunition, we were able to hold them, for a short time. Lying flat on the jungle floor we were able to give fire without taking hits from the enemy guns. But for some reason they’d decided this was the main thrust of the battle. The place they had to defend, and forty men became fifty, sixty, seventy, and eighty. Whoever was in command threw them at us in an insane effort to smash through our intense fire, and at first we held them.

  Byrd fired repeatedly, and another M-60 joined i
n, their heavy fire tearing into the enemy ranks, but shooting through dense jungle has its problems. Problems like not being able to see the target until the last moment, and they were coming closer. Someone at the rear of the enemy ranks screamed an order, and they made a final, massive rush toward us. We kept firing until the gun barrels were hot, but we’d shoot a man and two more, three more would take his place in the attacking wave.

  “There’s just too many of them,” Danny Gough shouted as he rammed yet another magazine into his rifle.

  “I’ve got a jam!” Byrd grunted, “Shit, I need a loader to feed the belts. Damn thing’s twisted.”

  I threw my M-14 to Jamie Erskine, who until then had been using his Colt and ran to assist, but I knew there wasn’t time. They were coming at us in a wave designed to roll over us and pound us into the dirt. I fumbled at the belt, but it was jammed so solid I was still wrenching at it, desperately trying to free it when Byrd said, “Too late. We’re fucked.”

  I gave the belt a final heave, and it came free, but he was right. It was too late. They were on us.

  Chapter Ten

  MACV After Action Report – Lessons Learned

  Upon completion of exploitation, 40-pound cratering charges are placed fifteen to twenty meters from all known tunnel entrances, and where extensive tunnel complexes exist, 10lb bags of CS-1 riot control agent are placed at intervals down the tunnel at sharp turns and intersections and tied into the main charge. Where sufficient detonating cord is not on hand to tie-in all bags of CS-1 to the main charge, bags of CS-1 are dispersed in the tunnel for detonation.

  An infantryman was shouting into a radio, screaming for assistance. Whoever was listening didn’t seem inclined to send any help, and he shouted at the other men to start pulling back. I glanced at Morgan and sensed his frustration. Sure, the enemy was here in overwhelming strength, but we had soldiers, too. We also had ammunition, and we had gunships. Surely we could do something. In a sudden flash of inspiration I recalled the grenades.

  Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  “Grenades!” I shouted, “Hammer the bastards!”

  They wrenched out the pins and tossed them toward the enemy. The VCs were close, and when the grenades exploded, hot metal fragments ripped through our ranks. Andy Murray went down to what the brass euphemistically called ‘friendly fire.’ Funny, it doesn’t seem quite so friendly when you’re on the receiving end. Byrd took a fragment to the shoulder and waved it away.

  “I’m okay, just a scratch.”

  He turned, and a moment later another of our grenades exploded, and this time the shard of metal tore into his neck. He went down without a sound and lay still.

  Morgan tossed another grenade and looked at me. “We should have pulled back when we could. Now it’s too late.”

  He lobbed another grenade that ripped into the nearest enemy ranks, and when we lifted our heads we had a temporary respite. Charlie didn’t like the taste of grenades, and I guessed they were pulling back to regroup and work out a new plan. I doubted they realized we were so few, for if they had, they may have kept coming. This was the lull before the storm, and we had a short envelope of time to decide our next move. Staying put wasn’t an option. The sensible plan would be to pull back.

  Until the VCs came up with a new plan, and mortar shells and machine gun fire raked the ground around us. A few shells hit the helicopters, and it was obvious if we went that way we’d take more casualties.

  Tam came up with an idea. “Private Yeager, there must be a tunnel around here. If they’re all on the surface, the chances are it’ll be empty. We could go underground until they’ve gone past, and when we come out, we’ll be behind them.”

  I didn’t like the thought of abandoning those other troops fighting some distance away, but we were too few to make much of a difference. Morgan, Danny Goff, Jesse Coles, and Jamie Erskine, relegated from flying a helicopter to slugging it out on the ground with the infantry. Then there was me, and there was Tam. Six in all, and if we had one more we could have made the Magnificent Seven. We didn’t have one more, and we weren’t likely to get one. We were trapped between a rock and a hard place. Morgan sounded interested in the idea.

  “We’d need to find a tunnel entrance, Lieutenant Tam, and that could take too long.”

  He was right, finding a tunnel entrance in the Iron Triangle was like picking the winning lottery ticket. Not impossible, but you wouldn’t bet your shirt on it. Then again, if we did find a tunnel and got inside, there was a possibility we’d not only survive but we could find Trinh. The man everyone wanted dead; the man who single-handedly was working to undermine the morale of our troops. I’d never forget the men of my platoon he’d left in a grotesque pile of mutilated limbs stuffed into a village well. If we could survive and nail the bastard, we’d have scooped the pool, and I could consign his soul to hell, to burn for a thousand years.

  Jesse agreed with her about finding a tunnel entrance. “We know they came out of the tunnels, and underneath this place I’d guess there’s a rabbit warren. Probably multiple entrances, and there’s a better than average chance we might just find one. Why don’t we look around?”

  The Sergeant glanced at each of us. “Anyone have any other ideas?”

  Nobody did. The tunnels were scary places, but so was being out in the jungle in the middle of a huge firefight, with mortar shells and machine gun bullets beating out their message of death. It was a tossup, stay out in the open and die, or try to get inside a tunnel and maybe, just maybe, survive.

  “Tam’s right. We should find ourselves a nice cozy, warm tunnel and wait it out.”

  We looked at Jamie Erskine in astonishment.

  A helicopter pilot, what does he know?

  It turned out he knew a lot. As if to reinforce what he was saying, a salvo of mortar shells whistled overhead and smashed into the ground close enough to shower us with chunks of flying metal and debris. The explosion threw earth and broken branches up into the sky, and we hugged the ground to avoid the flying debris and waited until it was over. Morgan looked at Jesse. “What are the chances?”

  A shrug. “Like I said, they came out of those holes, how hard can it be to find the way in?”

  “Pretty damn hard.” I had a good reason for not wanting to go back into one of those dark, stinking places. The name for it was naked fear. Apart from heat rash and insomnia, that was another legacy of Vietnam that would always haunt me. Claustrophobia. Days ago I’d made a rule, never go back down the tunnel, at least one where Charlie might be lurking. And now we were looking for another tunnel.

  “Now would be the best time to find them,” Morgan said, “If they came out in a hurry to join the fight, they won’t have been too careful about disguising them. I reckon we have a good chance.”

  He shrugged, Goff shrugged, Jamie shrugged. Except Jesse, who’d pretty much said everything he had to say, at least for that day, and didn’t feel he needed to add anything. Not even a shrug. Tam’s eyes gleamed. I didn’t shrug. Maybe I twitched, but that wasn’t to be confused with a shrug. Those tunnels scared me.

  Morgan nodded. He’d made up his mind. “Let’s do it.”

  At first, we didn’t move. The enemy brought in more mortars, firing random shells at what they assumed were the enemy positions. Someone called in counter battery fire from a long distance, and our artillery began pounding the jungle. Both sides dropped their shells too close for comfort, and we sweated while we waited for the Grim Reaper to decide whether we lived or died. Enemy fire or friendly fire, it was hard to make out the difference.

  The VC opened up next with a 105mm howitzer, a second gun joined in, and their shells fell close. They were doing a better job than Agent Orange, destroying the foliage to make it impossible to hide anything bigger than a mouse. More helicopters arrived, the rotor blades clattering as they hovered overhead, and several swooped in to land and disgorge yet more troops. The gunships circled overhead, firing into what they assumed was the enemy position.
It happened to be the position we were holding.

  “We need to move out,” Morgan grunted, “Sooner or later one side or the other is going to score a hit on us. If we’re going to be killed, we may as well get killed trying to do something useful. Follow me.”

  He crawled away, and we took a small bunch of VC by surprise. They’d been hiding behind a fallen trunk, and in the cacophony of explosions and automatic fire with the clatter of helicopter rotors, they had no chance of hearing our approach. The floppy hats were the first warning, a slight movement where there should have been none, and we circled to their flank. I counted eight men talking quietly amongst themselves. Obviously keeping their heads down while their comrades did the dirty work and shed blood.

  It didn’t save them. Under cover of the massive explosions, the whine and crackle of bullets, the roar of Huey turbine engines, the whistle and ‘boom’ of incoming artillery, we got to within five meters and opened fire in shattering, killing bursts. It gave no satisfaction, like shooting fish in a barrel, but it was kill or be killed. We wasted them all and moved in to check the bodies. They were all dead, but I noticed something beneath a bloodied corpse. A hole in the ground, no more than a few inches, and I called Jesse to come and take a look. Between us we dragged the body away and we saw it. A narrow entrance, dark and forbidding, with the familiar stench that was enough to turn the stomach of a buffalo.

  He was about to climb down when we heard shouts coming toward us. Vietnamese shouts, and we dived into the thick foliage and ducked down. Just in time, two VCs rushed to the bodies, spitting curses when they saw what we’d done to their comrades. Probably spitting threats of revenge as well, but I’d never learned the language, never wanted to. Vietnam may have been a beautiful country, or it had been once, but between the Communist invasion from the North and the American efforts to stem the tide, it had become a scrapyard of humanity. A place ruled by the bomb and the bullet, where humanity had taken a backseat, and inhumanity was the new wave.