Take Back the Night: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 3)

by Dennis Foley

  “That’s gonna be one pissed-off doctor when you get him down, Cap’n,” Easy said.

  “How did this happen?”

  “Well, you left him with DeSantis, didn’t you?”

  “Shit,” Hollister said, wondering what the fallout would be. “Send someone out there to rescue him from DeSantis before we all get sent to Long Binh jail.”

  Hollister walked into the mess hall to get a cup of coffee and go over his notes from the morning’s meeting without all the distractions of his orderly room.

  “Coffee, sir?” one of the KPs asked.

  Hollister looked up and saw a familiar face—Corporal Greenwood—from Fort Benning. “Greenwood? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Greenwood took the hand Hollister extended and pumped it, showing his enthusiasm to be in J Company. “It worked.”

  “What did?”

  “When I got out of your remedial training platoon, your string pulling got me reassigned to the Honor Guard company.”

  “My old company.”

  “Yes, sir. And I soldiered my way out of trouble there with the new CO.”

  “Price? He’s a good man.”

  “I’ll say,” Greenwood added. “With your help and his I got promoted and got orders to come back over here. I was afraid I’d get sent to one of those fucking leg companies again, but I made it,” he said as he puffed out his chest a bit.

  “And now you’re pulling KP?”

  “I’m just in charge of the detail to get the mess hall closed down to move it to Tay Ninh. I only got in last night. The first soldier told me he’ll have me assigned to a team by the end of the week.”

  “You sure you want to be here? In country?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d rather be here, as fucked up as it is, than in the World, where it’s even more fucked up.”

  “How about the drugs?”

  Greenwood smiled. “Cap’n, I scared the shit out of myself enough; I know I’ll never be near that crap again.”

  “Good. Drop in and see me after you get settled in, and we can talk a little more. I’d like to hear what you have to say about Juliet Company.”

  The coffee had been simmering most of the afternoon and tasted like it. Still, Hollister needed the stimulation. He filled his cup from the huge pot warming on the field range and found a table in the corner of the mess hall. He pulled a couple of painkillers from his shirt pocket and tossed them to the back of his throat and washed them down with the bitter coffee. But before he could get into his notes, the door to the mess hall opened and Captain Plummer entered.

  He was a sight. The starched and headquarters-looking doctor who had arrived at the Ranger compound that morning had been transformed into a combat soldier. Hollister steeled himself for the complaints he expected to hear from Plummer.

  “Goddamn, Hollister!”

  Hollister raised his hand in apology. “Okay, I know. My guys went a little too far.”

  “No,” Plummer said, pulling up a chair. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I joined the army.”

  “What?”

  “Hell, you think they teach us any of this stuff in medical training?”

  “Hadn’t given it much thought.”

  Plummer took off the floppy hat DeSantis had given him, exposing the white strip of forehead not painted with camouflage stick.

  “I have to give it to you. I really didn’t understand who your kids were and how hard they train. It must be pretty tough out there for them to go through so much to get ready for it.”

  “You want to go along on a patrol?”

  “Whoa! There’s a limit,” Plummer said.

  “Okay. How about going along sometime on an insert—with me, in the C & C?”

  “Now that I’d go for. I’d like to see how this all works.”

  “When it works—it works well. When it doesn’t, we come see you later.”

  Plummer was silent for a moment. “Yeah. I guess that’s what I didn’t understand. To me, you were just patients coming into my emergency room. I hadn’t ever given any thought to what your guys had just been through before ending up in my world.”

  “Well, I’m glad you enjoyed a little training with the troops today. I hope you’ll come around some more.”

  “I’d like to do that. I’d like the chance to get to know more about what you guys do.”

  “Well, you are welcome anytime, Doc.”

  Tay Ninh stood only a few minutes’ flight time from the nearest point on the Cambodia border and remained a vital hub of communications and traffic for the Communists who had Saigon as their objective. During the course of the war, Americans and South Vietnamese units had staged out of Tay Ninh, conducting operations in the surrounding forested areas, hoping to root out the Viet Minh, VC, and then the North Vietnamese.

  Hollister found a different Tay Ninh than he had remembered. Signs of withdrawal were everywhere. Buildings had been taken over by refugees from the countryside. Roadside shops, once filled with black market items, were gone.

  More than any city Hollister had been in since his arrival for his third tour in Vietnam, Tay Ninh was the one that screamed of withdrawal and failure.

  The compound Browning and Easy had picked had once belonged to a Vietnamese engineer battalion. While it didn’t quite measure up to the kind of barracks American engineers usually put together for themselves, it was more than adequate for Juliet Company’s needs.

  The compound was as big as a football field, surrounded by some wooden, masonry, and chain-link fencing—all of it topped with three rows of razor-edged concertina wire. The structures inside were a mixture of metal sheds and stucco buildings with red tile roofs. In all—fairly comfortable for infantrymen.

  The corners of the compound were marked by twenty-foot-high guard towers, offering an unlimited view of the city of Tay Ninh on the east and the reedy plains to the west—toward Cambodia. The central area of the compound featured a single chopper pad marked by a large H made of roofing tiles set into the hardstand.

  Easy met Hollister’s chopper, and two Rangers helped their captain unload his gear and carry it into the new orderly room. “Chopper pads?”

  Holding on to his beret against the chopper’s blast, Easy pointed toward a small gate. “Outside-a the wire. Got enough room to park six, and there’s a fixed-wing runway about a quarter mile down the road.”

  “How do we secure it?” Hollister asked.

  “The reaction force will have to pull the duty on the bunkers on the far side of the pads.”

  “Captain Zahn won’t be too thrilled about that.”

  “Not my place to say so, but I think I’d be happy to do that rather than humping through the boonies looking for land mines in a track.

  “I’ll never understand how those turret-heads do what they do. When they do it, that is,” Easy added.

  “I’ll remind him of that,” Hollister said.

  Easy waited for Hollister to drop his web gear on the porch of the orderly room and then took him on a tour of the compound.

  They reached the most secure looking of all the buildings. “Operations,” Easy said.

  Inside, they found Captain Thomas, Master Sergeant Caulter, and four other Rangers installing radios and stringing commo wire through a hole on the far wall.

  “This gonna work for you?” Hollister asked Thomas.

  “I think so.” He thumped the stucco wall with the heel of his hand. “I’m a little concerned about its ability to take any fire. Doesn’t look like whoever owned this place before ever worried about being shot at.”

  “You got a plan?”

  Thomas pointed the screwdriver he held at Easy. “I asked Top to find me some strong backs so we can sandbag this place.”

  “I have a feeling we’re going to be our own strong backs. Plenty needs to be done to get this place operational, and there is just no manpower pool.”

  Thomas put down the screwdriver and unbuttoned his shirt. “I had a feeling you’d be telling me
that. So don’t expect to see me at supper.”

  The orderly room looked like it had once been a military headquarters. Hollister’s office was next to Easy’s and had a half counter separating the two. It didn’t offer complete privacy for him, but Hollister didn’t mind. He was just happy to have a place to work when he was back at the launch site.

  He walked to the desk fashioned for him out of the rough wooden planks scavenged from artillery ammunition boxes. On it he found paperwork already starting to pile up.

  “Damn, Top! How the hell do I get away from this river of pulp?”

  The first sergeant chuckled. “If I knew the answer, I’d be the most popular first soldier in the army. Hell, sir, I could write my own ticket. I’d be having general officers fightin’ over making me their command sergeant major.”

  He raised his artificial foot off the floor and tapped the side of his shin against the wooden desk. “Peg leg and all.”

  “Well, for now, how about trying to keep this stuff away from my office whenever you can?”

  “I’ll try, sir. But all I can promise is someone else calling you or writing you to tell you you haven’t met some requirements or submitted some stats or some report or other bullshit those headquarters rats think up.”

  “What are they going to do to us if we don’t submit all that crap to them?”

  “They’ll whine and complain and tell tales on us. In no time, we’ll have more headquarters rats snoopin’ around here trying to figure out what the problem is with the Ranger Company’s admin.”

  Hollister took his forearm and swept the stack of paperwork aside, replacing it with his map case.

  “Screw ’em. I’m going out for a look-see of the AO. You want to get out of here and throw your expert eye on it, Top?”

  The first sergeant’s face brightened. “You bet I would. I been here two days, and I already hate this place. A little fresh air will do me some good, Cap’n.”

  Before Hollister had even folded his map, Tennant appeared in the doorway to the orderly room.

  “How’d you know I wanted to do some flying?”

  “There are good aviators, and there are some special ones like me. Be happy you got a special one. Most maneuver unit commanders don’t appreciate the high level of competence and daring a few of us aviators exhibit.”

  Hollister looked at Easy. “What the hell is going on around here? All you guys been out in the sun getting delusions of grandeur?”

  Tennant looked at Hollister and then at Easy. “I don’t get it.”

  Hollister shook his head, grabbed his beret, and waved both of them toward the door. “Let’s go find some cooler air.”

  Tennant had decided to let his peter pilot take care of getting the aviators settled in to their billets and maintenance area, leaving his seat for Hollister. Easy made himself at home in the troop compartment, resting his artificial leg up on the nylon bench seat

  “Jesus,” Hollister said, leaning forward, looking down at the terrain to the west of Tay Ninh. “This is some desolate shit!”

  “I find it hard to believe those stupid motherfuckers think they can just walk across a wide wet spot and think we can’t see them,” Tennant said over the intercom.

  “Most don’t make it. But enough of them do to make it worth our while to go find out how the whole thing starts out across the fence.”

  “Well, there it is. Right up there,” Tennant said, jabbing his gloved finger toward a trail running north-south, just visible over the top of the instrument panel.

  “You worried about antiaircraft fire?”

  “Aviation G-2 tells us they got ’em, but they’re trying not to use them so much unless they have been spotted and are protecting themselves. Seems like they have given their positions away one too many times and brought smoke and destruction down upon their little pointy heads.”

  Hollister rapped the light metal alloy frame of the chopper door with his knuckles. “Hope you’re right. I’ve never felt too comfortable with the thickness of the skin of these things.”

  Tennant laughed into his mouthpiece. “If the skin on a chopper was any thicker you’d have a real problem.”

  “How’s that?” Hollister asked, looking over to see if Tennant was kidding or not.

  “If a round got in here—you know, through a window or something—it might not be able to get out. It’d rattle around in here for hours, clearing out everything that lived and played inside this flyin’ machine.”

  “Why is it I find this hard to believe?” Hollister asked.

  “Don’t know. But we had our chance to speak up when they were building choppers, and us pilots wanted thin skin. We’d just as soon the round go out the other side of the chopper as soon as possible.”

  Seeing Tennant was unable to keep a straight face, Hollister smiled back at his command pilot. “Are you guys this full of shit when they select you for flight school or do you learn this in flight school?”

  They both laughed for just a minute, until they got closer to the Cambodian border.

  Hollister leaned forward and looked at the reed-covered fields stretched out for thousands of meters in front of the chopper. Most of it was abandoned. Rice fields that once produced crop after crop of rice had gone fallow.

  And everywhere there were the aquamarine pools of water created by bombs. There were so many of them they overlapped, creating interesting patterns in the grasslands. He wondered if the country could ever return to normalcy if the war ever ended. How could so much damage ever be fixed? Just returning the land to usable condition would take an enormous amount of work and would take generations without heavy earth-moving equipment.

  After the war was not his problem.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE RAIN PELTED THE palm-frond roofs of the huts sheltering them. A small, hunched-over soldier took off the sheet of plastic he had pressed into service as a raincoat.

  “We have much work to do on the trail,” Sergeant Dinh said, waving his hand off in the direction of the overflowing streambed.

  A frail Montagnard conscript squatted under the thatch, his arms hugging his body for warmth. “It will only wash away again.”

  Dinh spun around and leaned over, sticking his face close to the man. “Did I ask for your advice? Did I, Rat?”

  “My name is not Rat! It is—”

  “Quiet. I do not want to know your name. You are a savage of the lowest grade, a pagan who believes the forest is your god. You dress in loincloths and wear your hair like women. You are no different than the rodent who lives off garbage.

  “You will listen and take my instructions. You will not offer your opinion.”

  Dinh looked around at the others—a mixture of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Montagnards. All had been assigned to him as laborers. “We have an important mission. If we fail, thousands of our brave countrymen will be slowed or even die while they interrupt their invasion preparations to do our jobs.

  “Work hard. If I find you lingering at your duties, I will not hesitate to shoot you,” Dinh said.

  The laborers glanced at each other to see if anyone would respond, but no one replied.

  “Xuan,” Dinh said. “You have been with my work parties before. You know I have shot men for less than this moi’s insolence. Save his life. Tell him what you have seen.”

  Xuan, an aging Vietnamese farmer who had been taken from his fields in the Mekong flood plain nine years earlier, nodded to the Montagnard.

  “Rat did not mean to insult you, comrade. He is only cold and tired as we all are. When the rain stops, we will consider it our privilege to make the trail passable for our brave comrades from the North.”

  Rat didn’t apologize. Instead, he simply dropped his gaze to the ground in a submissive signal to Dinh. He was sure what Dinh said was right, and he would revel in the chance to shoot him. He thought it better to appear to give in than to argue with Dinh.

  The rainwater filled the small streams near the encampment. They swelled and overflowed
. The work parties tried to get up off the ground and out of the bone-chilling water until the flooding receded. Rat found himself sitting on top of a crude table built under a thatched roof designed for training transient North Vietnamese soldiers. Next to him was Xuan.

  “Why did you defend me in front of Dinh?”

  “He is a pig. His temper goes to extremes beyond his control. Once, last spring, he got angry with two women laborers. They stood up to him, and he began to shoot his pistol near them. He made them very afraid. He laughed and kept shooting into the trees near their heads.”

  “Did he kill them?”

  “Not right then. He kept it up until they were hysterical, and then he told them they could leave the work party. He told them not to ever come back.”

  “They got away?”

  “He yelled for them to run. Then he threw a grenade at them. It went off just as it hit the ground behind them—killing them both.”

  “Why did you speak up for me?”

  “I do not care about you. When he threw the grenade at the women, he also wounded two other laborers. I do not want to die just because you might.”

  Before they could finish the conversation, the sounds of an approaching helicopter scattered them. They were too far from their tunnel complex to run there. Instead, Xuan, Rat, and three others in the training area ran for the bomb shelter only yards away.

  The water filled the shelter, but Xuan and Rat had no choice. Rat went first. He slipped through the muddy entrance into the beige water. Chilled from the rain, he sank to the bottom of the water-filled bunker. His head broke the surface, and he found only inches between the surface of the water and the wooden beams holding the sagging earthen roof.

  “Slow. Don’t fall in,” Rat said, hoping Xuan would not splash the muddy water into his face. The debris from the bunker floated in clumps. Twigs, leaves, and dead insects dotted the top of the water. Rat tried to push them away from his mouth, only a fraction of an inch above the surface.