by Dennis Foley
The two Rangers found a gruesome sight—the dismembered remains of five men who had only moments before walked down a trail with all of the thoughts that normally slip through soldiers’ minds—home, family, girlfriends, wives—an end to the war.
Fass and Estlin searched the bodies for anything of intelligence value and collected the weapons. Every man on the team remembered there were still two VC somewhere down the trail who could easily double back. And there was no way of telling if there was still another VC element behind the five dead men.
Thirty seconds had passed. Hollister began to mutter encouragement under his breath. “Okay, come on. Let’s get it done. Come on. Move. Move.”
Estlin was bent over one of the bodies when Hollister heard the young Ranger gag at the urge to vomit. He hacked to clear his throat and then continued his search. Hollister remembered the sensations of searching his first dead man, and doing it with less composure than Estlin.
At a point where Hollister was about to speak up and hurry them, Estlin spun and reached out to Fass. He slapped him on the shoulder to let him know he was finished. He turned and watched Fass’s back while Fass shouldered what he would carry back to the dike.
Hollister checked his watch, then tapped Loomis, who had his radio handset pressed to his ear while watching the rear.
Loomis gave an exaggerated nod. “Choppers are on the way,” he said without turning around.
Back in the killing zone, Fass and Estlin took turns moving back to the dike. One would move a few yards at a time while the other covered his move.
It was nearing two o’clock when the team finally got stretched out in march order to move first to the objective rally point and then on to the pickup zone to meet their chopper. Hollister felt uncomfortable with the swamp, his fatigue, the anticipation of the complex needs of a night extraction, and a nagging sense that things were going too well.
Pulling off an ambush was difficult enough. But pulling one off without having to fire a single weapon and without taking friendly casualties or giving away your position was an incredible success. He tried to convince himself he was just rusty, and he would soon be back into the swing of Ranger operations—ready to deal with the realities.
The move to the rally point was filled with tension for each man, and nothing could make them more alert or more ready.
Hollister held up the patrol and went forward to the point again. He took Estlin and moved forward under the watch of the other four, ready to support them with well-aimed fire in the event of contact.
Hollister and Estlin picked their way through the marshy swamp, avoiding thorny branches reaching out for them.
Estlin reached a break in the brush and stopped. He waved Hollister forward without taking his eyes off the black hole that would be their rally point.
Hollister moved past Estlin and around the wall formed by the thicket. He held up long enough to listen and to allow his eyes to adjust to the darker interior.
Once Hollister was satisfied there was no obvious danger, he waved the others forward while he and Estlin covered their move.
It took another twenty minutes to close on the rally point where they would make the final arrangements for pickup. The team set up a hasty perimeter and readied themselves to defend it.
Hollister, Fass, and Loomis found a place where they could stand less than waist deep in the water and huddled under Loomis’s poncho for a map check and to make a radio call to Captain Browning.
The map confirmed Hollister’s estimate of their position and the location of their pickup zone. Like the insert, the PZ was another wide spot on the dirt roadway cut through the swamp. The distance was less than three hundred meters, and the ground between them and the roadway was marshy.
“What’s the last we heard from base?”
Loomis leaned closer to Hollister and whispered, “They rogered our request for extraction. Captain Browning said he’d call when they get in the C & C.”
“Tell ’em we’re two-zero minutes away from the Papa Zulu.”
Loomis nodded and cupped the mouthpiece on his handset to transmit the message.
Hollister tapped Fass. “This is where things start to go to shit. Everyone’s tired, and they feel they’re close to the pickup—that combination’s real bad.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Talk to the others and make sure they stay alert. I’m not satisfied we weren’t seen or followed. I want to be ready if there’s shit in the wind.”
“Roger that,” Fass said.
“Go to it now and send me Estlin.”
“Sir?” Loomis said, grabbing Hollister’s elbow. “Cap’n B rogered yours. They’re lifting off now. He says he’ll call twenty-five minutes out.”
“Okay, pass the word.”
Fass ducked out from under the poncho; Estlin took his place.
“We’re only going to have to make it, say three hundred meters, on a compass heading of one hundred degrees. But I want to offset so we can hit the right spot and not spend all morning looking for the LZ. So set your compass for a hundred and twenty, and we’ll work our way back left when we find the road.”
Estlin set the indicator line on his compass bezel and turned it for Hollister to look at it. Hollister nodded and said, “Get ready. We’ll be moving out shortly.”
Hollister strained to see the weather between them and the Ranger base. He watched the sky for winds aloft. The skimpy cloud cover seemed to be taking the good weather toward the choppers.
He had a nagging sensation something was not right. He pulled out his binoculars and made a slow sweep of the marshy area around them. As soon as he put the glasses to his face, he saw they had finally become a casualty of the patrol. Water floated in the bottom quarter of each lens barrel. It didn’t completely obscure his view, just the bottom part. They would not be much use to him in a day or two unless he got them fixed or replaced. Water in binos in Vietnam was soon followed by mold and other growth that took over the insides.
Hollister checked his watch again. He knew he would be hearing from the C & C any minute. He was anxious to move, and reached over to Estlin. “Move out in five.”
Knowing he had been through plenty of water, Hollister wondered what kind of shape his ammo was in. He was sure the magazine in his rifle was waterlogged, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t fire. Just to be on the safe side, he fished around in his rucksack, pulled out a new magazine, and replaced the wet one.
He turned the old magazine upside down and whipped it in an arc. The centrifugal force sent a spray of moisture out of the magazine. He decided not to put any trust in the wet ammo and tucked the magazine into a side pocket of his rucksack.
Estlin took up the point, and Hollister moved in behind him—in the slack-man position. Loomis, then Meadows, Fass, and Thomas followed.
Hollister turned to Loomis and whispered, “Stay awake. We’re not home yet.”
Loomis nodded and passed it back.
The first few steps were into a deeper part of the swamp. Each man held his weapon over his head to keep it out of the water.
Loomis pointed up and back toward Bien Hoa. “C & C, ’n’ the slicks are two-five out.”
The swamp bottom got a little easier to walk on as the water table dropped, and they found themselves threading through tangled vegetation that limited their visibility to five meters in any direction.
After another ten minutes, Hollister called a halt to listen to the swamp. He knew once chopper noises filled the air, it would be too late to try to listen for anything.
No one moved. They knew what Hollister was doing, and froze. The only sounds were those of the night and the plopping of water dripping from trees, falling back into the foul-smelling marsh. Hearing nothing else, Hollister signaled for Estlin to move out.
Just before they reached the roadway, Hollister heard the choppers. He slipped back and took the radio handset from Loomis. “Campus Killer Five, this is Six.”
He heard c
hopper noise over the helmet mike before he heard Browning’s voice. “Six, this is Five. We’re less than five out. The guns should be ’bout breakin’ over your heads about now.”
Hollister looked up. “Stand by.”
In less than a few heartbeats, the first Cobra screamed over the team’s position at full crank and then spiraled up and back to the east.
“They’re on station and over my head right now.”
“We’re going to pull up into a circle north of you and wait for your word to pick up,” Browning said.
“Shouldn’t be too long. Stand by.”
Hollister looked up at Estlin. He didn’t want the choppers circling any longer than they had to. He waved for Estlin to move.
The team moved out again and moved less than seventy-five meters when Estlin raised his hand to hold them up.
Hollister quickly moved forward alongside the bent-over Estlin.
Up ahead, not more than forty feet, was the roadway, rising ten feet out of the swamp.
The two dropped to their hands and knees to crawl up the slope. At the top, they found a flat, one-lane dirt roadway. They quickly looked to the right for any sign of trouble and then continued moving to the left to the pickup point.
A hundred meters, and Hollister held them up again. He had found it. The wide spot—marked by a large gash on one side of the roadway where the unused part had been eroded over time. He was sure. It was their PZ. He motioned to Estlin, and they slid down the bank, back into the armpit-deep swamp. He looked back toward the remainder of the patrol. He pulled his flashlight from his web gear and partially covered the lens. Pressing the button on the switch, he sent two quick slivers of red light to them.
Fass got the other four to their feet, and they moved out toward Hollister and Estlin. They set up on the west side of the road’s slope and waited for the choppers. Hollister posted Thomas and Estlin down in the swamp to watch their backs while the others faced up, down, and across the roadway.
The radio crackled. “Okay, Six, your ride is inbound. He’ll call short final. You ready?” Browning asked over the radio.
Hollister answered quickly, “Roger that. We’re at the edge of the PZ. Do you need a mark?”
“Stand by one,” Browning said.
Hollister clicked the switch twice to acknowledge Browning.
“Six. This is Five. We could use a small mark on short final.”
“Roger,” Hollister said. “Holler, and I’ll give him a mark.”
Hollister felt the muscles tighten across his chest as he looked around at the others. He hated the last few minutes before an extraction. He knew within moments he would be out in the middle of the roadway, exposed to any enemy fire and out of control of the situation.
Hollister looked back up the slope—twice his height. It was steep. And the chopper downwash would make it much more difficult for them to climb up to the roadway and then climb up into the bird with any speed at all.
“Let us have it, Six,” Browning said.
The nose of the chopper broke over the trees at the turn in the roadway. Hollister gave the pilot three quick flashes of his flashlight.
“I got it,” the pilot said.
Hollister recognized Chief Moody’s voice.
The chopper slipped to line up with the roadway and dropped the skids down into the slot between the trees, blades overlapping them.
Hollister yelled over the chopper noise, “Estlin, Thomas—let’s go!” He wanted to give them a head start.
The chopper reached a point where the trees were just wider than the rotor disk, and Moody yanked up on the nose, slowing and settling onto the roadway.
The Rangers began their climb up to the chopper even before it was on the ground.
The chopper touched down and slid forward ten feet before stopping.
Hollister helped Loomis, Fass, and Meadows into the chopper, looked back down the slope, and saw Thomas leading Estlin up out of the swamp.
Thomas reached the top first.
Hollister turned to reach out to help Estlin and saw Estlin’s eyes widen in surprise as his forward momentum stopped and he was somehow spun around. Hollister was suddenly conscious of a green line crossing between them.
“Fuck! We’re taking fire!” Hollister yelled as Estlin twisted from the impact of enemy rifle fire and fell back down the slope.
Hollister had dropped his ruck onto the cargo deck and turned to go after Estlin when Thomas hurled himself out of the chopper, taking a roll as he went down the slope in one somersault—hitting the water just a fraction of a second after Estlin did.
CHAPTER 14
HOLLISTER STEPPED UP ON the left skid and yelled into the small chopper window, “I got a man hit. Hold what you got!”
The face in the helmet was Chief Moody’s. “Make it fast. They’re up in front of us.”
Just then, a short burst of tracer fire ripped from the tree line and slashed diagonally across the road, missing Hollister and the chopper by a few feet.
Hollister looked back for Thomas and Estlin. Reaching into the chopper, he grabbed the handset from Loomis. “Five. Six. We have contact. Taking fire! One man hit. Where are the guns?”
“Guns should be rolling in—coming up the road behind you,” Browning answered.
A Cobra screamed across the top of the waiting slick and began a minigun firing run. The first rounds spewed from the rotating Gatling gun on the nose of the gunship just as its skids passed overhead. Shell cartridges rained down on Hollister and the pickup ship.
Hollister spotted the first red tracer lines abruptly stopping as each round augered into the roadway. The Cobra gunner wiggled the gun slightly left and right, making the red hose of minigun fire snake into the trees on both sides of the trail.
Reaching the end of his run, the lead gunship jerked up—out of its firing run, into a tight orbit to line up for another pass.
Hollister yelled a correction into the handset. “Add ten meters, lean on the right side of the road!” He spun back around to look for Thomas and Estlin again just in time to catch sight of Thomas powering up the slope, carrying Estlin over his shoulders.
“Hold on,” Hollister yelled to Moody in the waiting slick as the second Cobra passed over, making the adjustments from the first gunship’s run.
Dropping the handset, Hollister took a large leap from the roadway, landing on his heels halfway down the slope.
He reached out for Thomas to help him carry the wounded point man up the incline, but only got a handful of the slime that covered both of them. So he reached down and grabbed Thomas’s pistol belt and pulled up to help him overcome the muscle-burning demands on his legs to climb the slope with Estlin over his shoulder.
Two more slashes of enemy tracers slipped between them and the chopper. The trio reached the side of the bird as the first gunship made another run in front of the pickup chopper.
Thomas dropped Estlin onto the deck of the chopper and crawled in with Hollister pushing and Loomis pulling.
Hollister grabbed for the seat rail to help himself up and in just as another short burst of enemy fire sliced down the narrow space between the side of the chopper and the tree line, hitting the front sight blade of one of the door guns. He counted heads and yelled, “Go! Go! Go!”
Moody jerked some pitch into the blades and rolled the chopper forward just before its skids cleared the ground completely. As he did, Hollister, Loomis and Thomas trained their weapons out the door to fire on the spot the enemy fire was coming from as they passed over it.
But before they got even a few feet off the ground, they heard a frightening thunking sound up front. The chopper jerked first left then right, and a few enemy tracer rounds came over the console between the pilots and slammed into the transmission behind the Rangers.
The chopper lost momentum and altitude. The thought of going down flashed through Hollister’s mind, and he instinctively began to look for somewhere to jump.
He tried to figure out where th
ey were. The enemy fire coming through the front of the chopper had distracted him from his reference point on the tree line and he had no idea where the enemy might be. The last thing he wanted was to bail out of a falling chopper into the source of fire bringing down the chopper.
The chopper continued to drift off to the left.
Hollister could see a large tree in their path. He knew if the pilot didn’t get some altitude they would hit it.
The chopper yawed to the right, picked up a few feet of altitude—putting it barely fifteen feet off the ground—and struck the upper part of the tree.
The blade strike caused the chopper to jerk wildly. The sounds of the gunships firing behind them gave Hollister some confidence they had passed over the enemy position, and they might be out of range.
The crippled chopper began to shake violently. The passengers and crew were being jerked in a rhythmic pattern—so hard the Rangers grabbed for their weapons to keep from losing their grip on them.
Hollister looked up to the instrument panel. There was no help there. The instruments were jerking so wildly they were useless. Then Hollister remembered Estlin. He held firmly to the seat rail with one hand and reached over and grabbed Meadows, who was trying to stay on his hands and knees while working on Estlin.
“He’ll make it back to Bien Hoa. Will we?” Meadows said.
Hollister grabbed the handset from Loomis and tried to keep from slapping himself in the face with the mouthpiece jerking in his hand. “Five. Six.”
“Hold on Six,” a voice said. “I’ve got most of my radios shot out. I need this Fox Mike.”
Hollister realized it was Moody’s voice. “Go ahead, Chief.”
Giving the frequency to the pilot, Hollister caught part of Moody’s transmission to Captain Dale Tennant, who was flying the C & C chopper. “… fucked up my pedals and put my ass into a tree.” His voice was choppy. The helicopter was still flying, though not gaining much altitude. “Pretty bad blade strike. Gonna put it down the first spot I can find. You got me?”