by Dennis Foley
“We’re on you, Chief. The chase is a hundred behind and a hundred above you. Just give him a place to get in near you,” Tennant replied.
“Rog,” was Moody’s only response.
Hollister saw him roll off RPM with his left hand on the collective. As he did, the violent shuddering seemed to ease up, but the chopper slowed its forward airspeed and began to sink. At the same time the master caution and the RPM limit lights came on on the instrument panel.
The copilot turned and waved his hand to get Hollister’s attention and then pointed to his lip mike to let him know Hollister could use the FM radio.
“Five. Six. I’ve got one Whiskey India Alpha, but it looks like we’re putting this ship down and will have to move to the chase. You picking up the crew or what?”
“This is Five. Front seat says he’ll take the crew, and DeSantis will pick your element up with the chase. How’s your WIA?”
“Don’t know. Doc says he’ll make the trip.”
The chopper flew a long slow right turn over the trees to the margin of the swamp. Hollister looked out again. If they could just fly another thousand meters, the chopper could put down in any one of three rice fields surrounding the marsh.
Hollister looked back at Meadows for a sign. He was still hunched over Estlin, putting a field dressing on Estlin’s wound just below his rib cage. He looked up and caught Hollister’s questioning eye and gave an exaggerated nod.
“Okay, listen up!” Hollister yelled. “We’re putting down, and we’ll be picked up by the chase. Meadows, you and Thomas take care of getting Estlin to the chase. Fass, you get his ruck, and Loomis—his rifle, leave the captured weapons.”
The chopper lost more altitude and became more erratic. It seemed as if there was a problem with the tail rotor, since the craft kept yawing left and then right and then left again.
The sun broke the horizon as Moody lined the chopper up for a fallow field four hundred meters from the swamp. His control improved and then degraded and then improved again as they got closer to touching down.
Hollister looked out. Easy was in the C & C. The C & C was behind the chase and above it, and the two Cobras were circling the landing zone Moody had picked.
Hollister scanned the nearest tree lines for any sign of enemy activity or fire. Seeing none, he looked out toward the roads. The traffic on the highways was always a good indicator of what the civilians thought the threat was. A well-traveled roadway suddenly void of traffic was a bad sign.
The road nearest the emergency landing zone had little traffic on it—but it had some. That didn’t tell Hollister much. They could just be avoiding the area because of all the American choppers and the gunships orbiting. It could also be a good indication they knew the VC were waiting in the nearby tree lines.
As Moody’s chopper began to settle, it started to buck and jerk more wildly. Every man in the chopper hoped Moody could hold it together long enough to put the wounded bird on the ground, and they would take it from there.
Just at the moment the chopper reached the weed-covered paddy field, it leveled out and made one of the sweetest landings Hollister had experienced. There was only time to say a silent thank-you as they vaulted from the chopper.
Hollister turned to catch Moody getting out of his seat, the chopper blades still turning.
Moody hit the ground, looked up at the slowing blades, and shook his head. “Amazing machine,” he yelled to Hollister, who stepped back far enough to see most of the chin bubble in front of Moody’s seat was missing and the right pedal was shot off at floor height. Hollister was equally amazed Moody had survived and had been able to land the chopper.
Moody shrugged and smiled, then pointed off to the rear—to the C & C. “Better get going. There’s my ride.”
The flight back to Bien Hoa was beautiful in contrast to the moments of near disaster just passed. Hollister had found a dry pack of cigarettes, which he passed around the chopper.
He worked his way over to Estlin’s side and lit one for him. “How ya feeling, Ranger?”
“I never saw the bus that hit me.”
“You hurting?” Hollister asked, looking for a sign from Meadows.
Meadows shook his head, reassuring Hollister that Estlin was still holding his own.
“I’ll hang in there. You gonna give me a couple a days off?”
Hollister smiled at Estlin. “Yeah. But when you get back, I want you to brush up on your landings. That was the worst tumble I ever saw a jumper take.”
Estlin laughed and then coughed at the cigarette smoke. “Shit, I’m just glad the fucking water was at the bottom or I really woulda busted my ass.”
The last part of the flight to the hospital was bone-chilling for Hollister and the others. They had been so wet for so long, the evaporating, stagnant water dropped their temperatures enough to make them shiver even in the Asian morning warmth.
The C & C landed first. Moody got out and walked to the hospital entrance. Then the chase replaced the C & C, which took off, leaving Captain Browning on the pad.
Meadows and Loomis lifted Estlin onto a stretcher.
“What’s with Chief Moody?” Hollister asked Browning.
“He’s wounded.”
“Wounded? He didn’t let on.”
“Looks like he caught some frags.”
Inside the clearing station, medics had already stripped Estlin and Moody and put them on tables for treatment. Easy was at the desk, taking care of the paperwork on the wounded Ranger.
Moody was alone, a small lime drape covering his crotch. Estlin was surrounded by a doctor, a nurse, and two medics. Hollister decided to let them work on Estlin without interrupting them. He moved to the far side of Moody’s stretcher.
As he did, Hollister could see the multiple puncture wounds up Moody’s side and up under his right armpit. The wounds were all small, but some had pieces of metal and scraps of Nomex flight suit material sticking from them.
“How ya doin’?” Moody asked, grinning.
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d been hit?”
“Wasn’t real sure myself. Then, when I was sure, I didn’t see anything anyone could do. So I just sucked it up and waited ’til we got back here.”
“How could you have that much crap in you and not know?”
“I’ll tell you, when the fucking chin bubble came loose and flew around in front of me, I started pumping adrenaline and hoping I didn’t shit in my flight suit. Then when we hit the fucking tree, I figured I was going to put it into the swamp. Then, when the fucker kept flying like it had four flat tires and a busted clutch—I was really freaked. I guess I was a little too busy to worry about it. I just wanted to get the crate on the ground in one piece.”
“Well, you did one hell of a job, Chief,” Hollister said, taking his hand to thank him and congratulate him.
“Glad to be of help, sir.”
Hollister walked around the Quonset hut to make eye contact with Estlin. He gave the Ranger a big smile. “How you doing?”
Estlin looked up at the nurse who was trying to wipe the grime away from his wound with a large gauze swab soaked in surgical soap. “Great, now. Beats layin’ up in the ambush site.”
Estlin spoke rapidly, the saliva in his mouth drying out, making it difficult for him to speak. Hollister knew the feeling well. Fear, a sense of real vulnerability, and anxiety over what would come next. Still Estlin tried to show Hollister he was calm.
“You going to be okay if we leave you here? They ought to be able to take care of what ails you and get you back to duty soon,” Hollister said, trying to diminish the seriousness of the wound to cheer up Estlin.
“Oh, I’ll be okay. I have a feeling this is going to get me a week or two of ghost time. I can lay up in clean sheets and eat hot chow.”
“Jesus, you guys smell like shit,” the doctor said from behind his mask. “What have you been in?”
“A place you’ll never understand,” Hollister said, surprising himself w
ith his own hostility.
The doctor shot Hollister an angry look.
Hollister looked at the doctor’s starched fatigues. “You spend a couple of days lying in a fucking swamp full of shit and see how fresh you smell, Doc.”
“You’ve got a pretty big mouth for a—” He looked for some sign of rank on Hollister’s grubby uniform.
Hollister let him search without giving him the satisfaction of identifying himself. “How long you been in the army, Doctor?”
“Twenty months. Why?” the doctor asked, getting angrier.
“Some of us have more time in the chow line.”
“What’s your name, soldier?” the doctor asked, pointing a surgical instrument at Hollister.
“It’s Hollister, two Is. You want a piece of my ass, you can find me at the Ranger compound.”
“I’ll just do that. Your commander is going to hear about your sorry attitude, mister.”
“You sure got a way with doctors, Cap’n,” Easy said as they walked down the path to the jeep sent to pick them up.
“The fucker pissed me off. He lives in an air-conditioned hootch, wears clean fatigues every day, gets all the class A rations and Stateside booze he wants, and Estlin’s smell offends him.”
Easy smiled. “You know, if it wasn’t for folks like that, we’d have nobody to compare Rangers to. We’d have nobody to talk shit about.”
Hollister had to laugh at Easy. “Top, that’s the worst defense of a fat rat I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, give me a little time, and I’ll come up with something better,” Easy said, his broad grin unflagging as he awkwardly backed into the jeep, raising his prosthetic leg over the side.
It was almost two A.M. when Easy stuck his head in the doorway to Hollister’s office. “They said they’re sending Estlin to the Philippines for a month to heal up. Seems there’s no permanent damage.”
“Great,” Hollister said. “How’s Chief Moody?”
“They just finished pickin’ all the shit out of him, and they’re going to release him tomorrow. He’s going to be grounded for at least two weeks.”
“You know, I’d heard so much bad shit about what has been going on over here, I was really afraid the Rangers might have gone sour too. But you should have seen this bunch out there. They were good, not great—that’d take some more training. But they never laid down on me.”
“So you’re feeling better about Juliet Company?”
“Yeah. But we need practice for every swinging dick in this company before we can send them out there.”
“I gotcha,” Easy said with a wink. “What’s next?”
“First, I want some awards recommendation forms for Moody and Thomas and Moody’s copilot. They all deserve a piece of colored ribbon. Then, I get some sleep. I couldn’t be more tired if you kicked me in the head.”
CHAPTER 15
JRAE DIDN’T NEED TO be told there was something wrong. She felt a dark weight.
It was an hour before dawn. The coughing of Montagnards and the distant crowing of an early cock were the only sounds. She sat up, spun on the long axis of her hammock, and reached out for the hard-packed earth with her toes.
In the darkness, all she could make out across the compound was the glow of a cigarette at a point too far from where Krong’s hammock normally hung. The hillside behind the structure offered no contrast for Jrae to make out Krong in the blackness cloaking them before dawn.
Jrae decided to use the time before the sun broke the horizon to bathe at the communal water point. Wandering into the men’s building that early would be disruptive and might embarrass Krong.
Other women had already gathered to bathe. Washing the dust from the resettlement compound off and cleaning the wood-smoke smell from their hair was a small pleasure.
Jrae wrapped a simple pak cloth around herself and tucked the top in over her left breast. She tightened her stomach muscles to ward off the urge to shiver as water evaporated from her skin.
She found her comb parted in her hair. Krong had made it from the beak of a large bird when she was only five years old. Her mother had used it to comb the lice and small insects out of her hair. When she was older, she used it to help wash out her hair and comb it dry in the midday sun.
She let the morning breeze finish drying her off and gathered up the few toiletries she had collected in a salvaged one-pound coffee can she got from Beck’s office.
She knew why the other men were approaching her as she walked from the bath to find Krong. They didn’t need to tell her he was already on his way to the Underworld.
She followed them back to Krong’s hammock. He had died in his sleep, and he looked like an old man still locked in the grip of a dream. The leathered brown skin and platinum hair all seemed to have been washed by something that had pulled the richness of his colors from him and left a pale old man behind. The light green, cast-off uniform trousers he had been given by the Vietnamese showed a large dark stain where urine had left his body and puddled under the hammock.
Two Vietnamese soldiers began yelling over one another as they disagreed on what needed to be done with the body.
Jrae waited until they tired of arguing and wandered away to the small headquarters building where the Vietnamese spent most of their time.
She found a spot in the shade near his hammock to squat and look at Krong for the last time. He had seemed so large and strong to her when she was a girl and he was village chief. But his remains showed the toll the years had taken on him. His fingers were at once callused and slender. Gone was the sense of power his hands once projected.
Much of how he looked in death had come on since leaving Yoon Dlei. She realized she had not really seen how frail he had become—how old he had grown.
His death marked the loss of the last immediate member of her family; assuming her brother, Pek, had died in captivity.
Jackie Beck reminded her the Vietnamese were the hosts at the relocation camp and not the Americans. The fact that they had refused to take Krong’s body back to Yoon Dlei for burial was their decision. It would be a loss of face for the Vietnamese if he—an American—insisted. At that moment, she made herself a promise to find some way of moving Krong’s body to the ancestral burial grounds—someday.
“What will happen to me now?” Jrae asked.
“Now that what?” Jackie replied.
“Now I not have family here.”
“You don’t have family here,” Jackie corrected.
“Can I stay?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“I don’t know. You pay me here.”
Jackie tapped a strange-looking chart on the wall behind his desk. It was numbered boxes with Xs in them. “I’m gettin’ mighty short here. Be outta here in less than two months.”
“You go?” Jrae asked, surprised by his announcement.
“You bet. I’m not planning on spending my life here.”
Jrae showed her alarm at the announcement. Jackie Beck had been the only person she had met since leaving her village who had treated her decently.
“Maybe we need to find a new home for you?”
“A home?” Jrae said, confused by the reference.
“No, honey. I mean a new place for you to work—and I guess—live there, too.”
Jrae searched his face for some expression of enthusiasm for such a change.
Beck made an X on the day’s box on his short-timer’s calendar and smiled at her. “Don’t you worry. I’ll talk to the group sergeant major. He’ll know of a good place for you.”
“Some of the troops thought they’d head out for a little exercise. Would the captain be interested in joining them?”
Hollister woke up, his head on some papers. He had fallen asleep at his desk. Easy was standing in the doorway.
“Shit! What time is it?” Hollister asked as he tried to focus on his wristwatch.
“Zero dark hundred hours,” Easy said. “They’ll be formin’ up in one-five.”
&nbs
p; “Any coffee around here yet?”
Easy turned to the outer office and pointed at a soldier standing out of Hollister’s view, a cup of hot coffee in his hand. “Give it to the CO, son.”
The soldier slipped in, put the coffee down, and stepped out as quickly as he had entered.
Hollister stretched, looked at the papers on his desk, and shook his head. “I’m never going to forgive you for forgetting to tell me about all this crap when you were encouraging me to stay in the army, Top.”
“I was thinking some chickenshit paperwork wouldn’t faze an authentic Airborne-Ranger, Special Forces, combat-experienced, master parachutist like the captain. So I just didn’t mention it.”
Raising the coffee to his lips, Hollister blew across the top, then took a sip. He made a face and then checked his watch again. “This shit is strong enough to walk on. And I’m going to be late, and it won’t get you off the hook.”
The morning run didn’t do much to invigorate Hollister. He was conscious of his fatigue and the pain in his hip. He had promised himself to work it out by making all the PT formations. But doing it was more painful than he expected.
He tried to get a sense of the Rangers. They just didn’t have the same attitude or esprit de corps his first LRP detachment or the original J Company had. He knew what made them different from the earlier Rangers was attitude. Training would help, and training was essential. But their attitude would come out of feeling special and being special. It was up to him. It would mean he would have to tighten the screws, weed out the losers, and recruit some hard chargers.
The calisthenics were no easier for Hollister’s bad leg. Still, he forced himself to do all the exercises and not favor his leg.
At the end of PT, there was very little chatter or grab ass. A sure sign of low morale. Easy announced chow call. Hollister considered breakfast, thought he might pass, and then realized he would have to fight his habit of not eating enough to stay healthy.
Thomas, Browning, Easy, and Hollister huddled in a corner of the mess hall over trays of greasy eggs, toast, sausages, and reconstituted milk.
“Top, get the mess sergeant on this shit,” Hollister said, pointing his fork at his food. “This won’t cut it.”