by Dennis Foley
“I want you to be bellyman in the chase ship on my insert.”
“Glad to, sir. Say when.”
“I don’t know enough about too many of the NCOs yet, and I’d like to know I’ve got someone in the chase ship who I can count on if it goes into the shitter.”
DeSantis smiled. “Thanks, sir. I was serious the other day when I told you I’m glad to see you back. We’ve been in some real trouble around here.”
“Well, those days are over. But so are the good times.”
“To tell the truth, I’d rather pass on the good times. That’s what gets Rangers killed. I got too much time in this company and in this shithole of a country to flush it all because the chain of command has its head stuck up its ass.”
CHAPTER 11
THE WEIGHT OF HOLLISTER’S rucksack brought back the old unpleasant memories of humping the bush. He had been on so many patrols, but they never got easier. Each patrol taught him something else he had to be concerned about, a new danger facing his teams, a new threat to their lives.
Steadying his load one last time, Hollister jumped up and down to see if his gear rattled.
He looked at himself in the small mirror in his room. Camouflage stick had covered all of the exposed flesh on his face, neck, and hands. And his equipment was void of any shiny metal spots. In earlier years, he would have used shoe polish. The invention of the black marking pen was a Ranger lifesaver.
He picked up his rifle, automatically checking to be sure it was unloaded. He knew it was, but wanted to be true to his habit of checking. It was a small thing, but filled with positive consequences.
He picked up the claymore-mine bag he used to carry several small items in and slung it over his shoulder. Thinking he was ready, he looked around his room for any sign of something he had forgotten. He knew whatever he left behind would stay behind until he returned. There was never a second chopper trip for things forgotten.
Operations had scrounged up two three-quarter-ton trucks to move the team, equipment, and supplies to the airfield. Hollister decided to conduct his patrol inspection next to the vehicles themselves in order to allow some of the gear to rest on the tailgates.
He lined up the five others and began with Estlin, who would act as grenadier on the ambush. In his routine manner, Hollister started at the top of Estlin’s head and worked down. He checked his camouflage, the gear strapped to the front of him, and his grenade launcher. He asked Estlin questions about procedures at the landing zone, movement to concealment, and emergency signals on the move.
While Hollister inspected his team, acting company commander Browning made last-minute coordination with operations, fire support, and air force support, and then set up his radio and the artillery radio on the floor of one of the trucks to make a commo check.
As Hollister continued with Estlin, he caught sight of Easy coming out of his hootch wearing his web gear, carrying a rifle, a map case temporarily clasped in his teeth.
Hollister gave him a questioning look.
Easy stopped near Hollister and finally found a place for his map case in his pocket. “Morning, sir. Fine day to kill Commies, ain’t it?”
“Where are you going, Top?”
Easy nodded his head toward the west. “Out there—Indian country. Captain Browning asked me to ride along on the insert.”
Hollister looked over toward Browning and got a cross between a knowing look and a request for an okay for Easy to ride along.
“You think you’re up to this?” he asked Easy.
Easy tapped his plastic leg with the front sight blade of his CAR-15 and smiled. “If we have to go down out there, I’ll take this off and beat some little zipperhead fucker to death with it.”
Hollister tried not to scold his old friend. “I don’t have to tell you what a problem it could be if you ended up on the ground, and we had to get in to evac you.”
Easy’s expression changed to one of the most serious Hollister had seen. “Captain. If it looks to me like I’m holding anyone up or causing anyone’s ass to be out in the breeze—I’ll take my chances and wave you off. I know what the risks are, and I’m in for a dollar not a dime around here.”
Hollister nodded. “Okay. Just make sure you don’t go trying to pull anyone off the LZ again.”
“Yeah, I can’t afford to lose another leg,” Easy said with a grin.
Hollister returned to his inspection.
“You’ve done your homework,” Hollister said.
Estlin smiled, his white teeth gleaming against the camouflage grease on his face. “Yes, sir. I don’t mind telling you the thought of going into the AO without the answers to all those questions scares the shit out of me.”
“Good. Just hold that thought. A little garden-variety fear will do you good every time.” He tapped Estlin on the shoulder and turned him around, then checked his rucksack and the gear attached to it.
“You ain’t gonna get me, Captain. I been studyin’ up on this since we got the warning order.”
“That’s what I want to hear. Now tell me what ammo you have with you.”
“Got thirty rounds of shotgun and twenty high explosive.”
Hollister finished checking the tie-downs on the side pockets of Estlin’s ruck and slapped him on the top of the rucksack. “You’re okay. Sit down ’til we have to load up.”
He moved to the next man, Captain Thomas, and smiled at him. “When was the last time you were out in the bush?”
“Shit, it’s been a while.”
“What kind of shape do you think you are in?”
“Good enough not to embarrass myself out there, I hope.”
“Me, too. I’d sure hate to medevac a captain for heat prostration.”
Hollister did the same detailed inspection of Thomas, asking the same kind of questions and checking each piece of his equipment. It became clear to the others there really wasn’t going to be any rank out on Hollister’s ambush.
Hollister finished the inspection, and then turned to Lieutenant Fass. “Okay, check me out.”
Fass handed his rifle to Estlin and began his inspection of Hollister and his equipment.
“Go ahead,” Hollister said.
“Go ahead?”
“Run the questions by me.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Fass said. He thought a minute and then began to ask Hollister about call signs, frequencies, flight times for medevacs to the ambush location, locations and capabilities of supporting artillery batteries, rules of engagement, and the challenge and password for the day.
Fass finished his inspection of Hollister and tapped him okay.
Hollister turned to the patrol. “I want to make this perfectly clear.” He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder toward the Cambodian border. “There might be enough wrong with the way things have been running around here to make it pretty dicey out there. You could get dead because someone back here steps on his dick.
“You don’t have to go. You can pass up this patrol. I won’t punish you for it. But I’ll reassign you to some other unit.”
None of the five responded.
“Okay,” Hollister said. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Now let’s go out and get one.”
The roadway to the aviation battalion area was clogged with morning traffic. Hollister watched as the Vietnamese civilians tried to get their wares to the marketplace. He was surprised to see the dramatic increase in numbers of young men—of military age. He had heard there were plenty of Vietnamese soldiers who had deserted as well as those whose families had been able to pay to have their sons exempted from the draft. Hollister had to assume most of the young Vietnamese men he saw fell into both of those categories, and the thought irritated him.
He looked around at the Rangers, soldiers who had been asked to risk their lives for people who wouldn’t even risk their own. He tried to put it out of his mind. Out on the ambush, he didn’t want to be thinking about how many South Viets were not holding up their end. He knew it would be more than c
ounterproductive.
He tried to find something else to think about and reached into his shirt pocket for his notebook. At least he could focus on some of the details of the mission he might need in the dark—when looking at the notebook would be difficult at best.
As he slipped his hand into his pocket, he wished there were a letter from Susan to take his mind off of the mission, his anxieties, and Vietnam. On earlier tours, he could always count on having a recent letter to reread. It would remind him of who he was, what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to be—all things that got confused in the bush and distorted in the long nights. He missed her.
At the aviation battalion, Hollister made one final check of the chase ship before loading his patrol into the insert chopper. Reaching the chase, he found DeSantis on his hands and knees rechecking the rope routing on the McGuire rig he had tied in.
“Think there’s any chance we’ll need that?”
DeSantis turned and looked over his shoulder at Hollister. “If we don’t, I’ll be more than happy to pack it back up later. If we do, I don’t want to have to tell you I’m not ready.”
They both knew the flat terrain near the ambush site reduced the need for the rig, but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t run into trouble on the way in or out—something that might cause them to have to use the extraction rigging.
“Good deal. You want me to cross-check it?”
DeSantis scrambled out backward and motioned toward the floor of the chopper. “Please. I’d feel a lot better if I had a second set of eyes and hands go over this rig.”
Hollister went over the ropes, snap links, and cabling of the McGuire rig with as much attention as he had paid to packing his own gear, checking out his rifle, and inspecting the members of his patrol. He’d been on enough patrols where McGuire rigs had been used to know they had to be anchored in right. If not, the rig would be more dangerous than the reason for the extraction.
Once he was satisfied with the rigging, Hollister gave DeSantis a nod and headed toward the lift chopper that would carry his team. There was enough unsaid about how he would be relying on DeSantis to be there if the team needed him.
By the time Hollister and the patrol got to the chopper, the pilots had the blades turning at flight idle and were going through the end of their preflight checklist.
Hollister waved to the others. His watch read 1100 hours, exactly. He was pleased they had met their scheduled liftoff time. He didn’t want the first mission to start off late—it wouldn’t set much of an example for the others in Juliet Company.
He pulled his map out and flipped it open to the objective area for one last look at the prominent terrain features, the relative position of the ambush site to the landing zone, the gun-target line for the only supporting artillery battery, and location of the layup position they had picked.
The preflight seemed to be taking too long. He looked up to the pilots to see if there was any problem. The door gunner tapped Hollister on the shoulder and pointed toward the front of the chopper. “The pilot would like to talk to you.”
Hollister nodded and slid off the floor of the chopper and onto the ground. At the pilot’s door, Hollister stepped up on the footpad on the skid to be closer to the pilot so they could talk over the chopper noise.
Mister Moody was a CW2 and typical of so many warrant-officer pilots: on his second tour, tired, and not the same hot-dog chopper jock who had arrived for his first tour. He pulled the lip mike away from his face and yelled out the Plexiglas window, “I just got a message from my flight operations folks there’s a contamination problem at the refueling point.”
“What’s it mean to us?”
Before he could answer, the sounds of the turbine changed frequency. The peter pilot had cut the power to shut the chopper down.
“Means we have to check out the fuel on board, and if we have some of the bad fuel, we’ve got to ground this ship and find another one to take you in.”
“Okay. How long do you think this’ll all take?”
Moody looked at his watch. “I’d suggest you take your troops to chow. It’s gonna be at least that long, even if everything checks out okay.”
Hollister gave the pilot a thumbs-up and stepped down off the pad.
After he sent the team to the aviation battalion mess hall, Hollister went back to talk to the pilot. “What’s the verdict?”
Chief Moody looked up from his green-plastic logbook, where he was entering some maintenance data. “The crew chief is taking a fuel sample over to maintenance now to have it checked out I’m pretty sure we’re going to have to park this baby and find you another chopper.”
Hollister made a face. “So—does a new chopper mean a new crew, Chief?”
“Might. It’s still up to operations to decide who drives what.”
“Shit! If we get a new crew—we’ll get fliers who haven’t been on the recon and haven’t been to the briefings. If you guys fly us in a new chopper—you won’t know much about the new aircraft.”
Moody pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and offered Hollister one. Hollister took one and lit his and the pilot’s.
“Tell you what, Captain. I’ll head on over to flight ops and see if I can scrounge up a chopper that’ll do the job. And I’ll push for us to fly it.”
Hollister smiled. “That’s about as good I can expect, I guess. Thanks.”
“Glad to do it. If we don’t take your mission, we’re liable to end up ferrying little people—chickens, pigs, and screaming kids from somewhere to somewhere they don’t want to go. I’d rather fly a new chopper into your LZ.”
“You not worried about an insert in a fresh chopper?”
“I’d fly you in wearin’ a gasoline suit with lit road flares in each hand before I’d ferry Viets around all day.”
Hollister smiled and patted the pilot on the shoulder. “Okay, let me know.”
After a meal, the Rangers found a shady spot next to the mess hall, dropped their gear, and tried to make themselves comfortable for the wait.
Soon, the midday sun squeezed out the shade, and they suffered from the direct sunlight and the heat.
“I really hate this shit,” Thomas said, wiping the sweat from his face with the medical cravat tied around his neck. He got up, fanned the front of his shirt to try to get some air up in it, and patted his pockets for a lighter to relight his cigar.
“I hate to tell you you’ll have to get used to it—but get used to it.” Hollister said, running his upturned forefinger across his own forehead to keep perspiration from running into his eyes.
“It’s like this all the time?”
“When you’re humping with a rifle company there’s always something to do, and it all goes toward getting another day behind you. But in Ranger ops, everything’s a sequence of events, and the next step never happens until you get past the last one.
“The best you can do is look out for this kind of delay and try to figure out a way to slip in a backup plan. Choppers will be choppers. You can’t ever get enough blade time out of them. This could be a lot worse.”
“How’s that?” Thomas asked.
“We were going in in daylight anyhow, and once we get in, we’d be lying up in the sun, sweating there, too. So, if we have to wait, this is good enough,” Hollister said, looking up at the sun.
“I sure hope we don’t have to put this off ’til another day. I can’t get my heart up for this again if we scrub.”
“There’s plenty of adrenaline where that came from.”
Thomas lit his cigar one last time and smiled. “Wish I had a little more ice water in my veins.”
“If you did, I wouldn’t want you on this team or as my ops officer.”
“Okay, Captain. We’ve got a chopper,” a voice said.
Trying to shake the fog from his brain, Hollister sat up and realized he had dozed off. He looked up against the late afternoon sun and squinted at the silhouetted figure. “Moody?”
“Yes, sir. I’m
ready to fly if you’re ready to ride.”
“Old chopper or a new one?”
“New one. The other one had some bad juice in her belly. But the chase ship, the command-and-control ship, and the gunships are okay.”
“Problems?”
“It ought to be okay. This is not so tough an insert,” Moody said, pulling his Nomex flight gloves out of his pocket.
“All of them are tough until you guys are gone and we are down, in and cold.”
“Yes, sir—I guess you’re right there. I just mean I’m not as worried about flying a new chopper on this one ’smuch as some others I’ve been on.”
Wiping the sweat from his eyes, Hollister got to his feet and hoisted his rucksack. “Okay, let’s do it.”
The others didn’t need to be told. They were on their feet and making last-minute adjustments of their gear.
“New war paint,” Hollister said, reminding the others the sweating had washed away much of the camouflage stick they had carefully applied before loading up the first time.
Hollister looked over to Brownie standing next to the C & C. “We going as is? Any change ’cause of the delay?”
Browning shielded his eyes from the sun with the palm of his hand. “I’d like to put you in first and move the two fake inserts ’til after.”
“Okay with me,” Hollister said. “You tell the pilots?”
Brownie nodded.
“Mount up,” Hollister said.
The hands on his Rolex were straight up and down—six P.M. Hollister leaned against the bulkhead behind Moody’s seat and looked out at the sun setting up ahead of the chopper as they headed toward Cambodia.
“’S gonna be dark by the time we get down and in,” Hollister yelled to Thomas, sitting next to him in the left door of the insert chopper.
Thomas made a face, then shrugged as if to say What are you gonna do?
Hollister nodded and smiled. “Tough it out.”
The five choppers took up a flight formation with the C & C, the insert, and the chase ships in a graceful echelon-left formation behind the two Cobras.