by Dennis Foley
“Everybody—including pilots and crews. If they go down in a gassed area, it’ll be the only thing that’ll give them a leg up.
“One other thing,” Hollister said. “I want to borrow those tunnels the Twenty-fifth Division found under the base camp at Cu Chi and send our folks down there to train in them. In masks.”
“In masks?” Browning said. “We’re going to have our share of heat injuries, boss.”
“Rather hose ’em down with water and feed ’em salt tablets than let some eager NVA mole blow their faces off while they’re trying to find ’em in dark tunnels full of gas.”
“Okay,” Thomas said.
“Oh, one other thing. Plan for each team to take three extra masks with them.”
“You being optimistic about how many we can snatch?”
“No, just a lack of confidence in the masks. If we have some go sour on the ground, we’ll have spares.”
By the end of the next day, teams were rotating between training stations that included two days for each team in the Cu Chi tunnels.
Hollister chose to set the example. He stood first in the line to enter the gas chamber.
It was nearly eleven when Hollister got to the bottom of his in-box and found some mail addressed to him. One was from his mother. His father’s health was continuing to decline, and she made no mention of her frail condition. Hollister worried about his parents.
He began to draft a reply in his head to encourage them to get some help without reminding them that the need for help was directly related to the fact that they were both in their late sixties. He knew it would take some delicate tap dancing to keep them from reading between his lines.
Another official-looking envelope had come to him through the field force message center and had his name and company on the front. Under the “For Official Use Only” marking printed on the envelope, the initials PM were hand-lettered in ink. He knew the envelope was from Perry Mann, his old first sergeant from Benning—stationed in Saigon.
Hollister opened the envelope and found the casualty list for the previous week. On the list of 108 Americans killed was one that had a red check mark next to it. It was Sandy Garland’s name. Sandy had been promoted to captain, assigned to a helicopter battalion in the Mekong Delta, and was listed as KIA as the result of combat actions.
The news gripped Hollister’s chest. He remembered his talented, cheerful, and very bright executive officer from Fort Benning. Then he thought of Sandy’s wife and new baby, who had to be approaching her second birthday. He swallowed hard to suppress the pain. Another friend gone. Another widow. Another baby with no daddy. He suddenly wanted a drink.
He decided to write a letter to Jeanie Garland before the time got away from him. In it, he reminded Jeanie of the Sandy Garland he remembered—a good soldier and a good man. He hoped he could help her with the pain of her loss and offered to be available to help her in whatever her needs were. It took him almost two hours to write the letter.
Sealing the envelope, he felt nothing he had said in the letter really conveyed what he felt. Still, he couldn’t tell her he was having his own doubts about why they were even in Vietnam.
The other envelope had the return address of Susan’s lawyers. He held it for a moment, not wanting to open it. Without needing to open it, Hollister knew anything from her lawyers was bad news. He finally slipped his finger under the flap held down by the folded fastener and ripped it open.
Inside the envelope he found more court papers dissolving their marriage. He leaned back in his chair and let the weight of the document sink in. He wasn’t completely sure just what the precise meaning of all the legalese was, but the cover letter announced that the court decree proceedings were complete.
He dropped his head into his hands. It was so easy for him to still see the pretty girl he had met in New York eight years earlier. Though she had changed a little, he always pictured her that way in his mind. He had fallen so much in love with her. He folded the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope and tucked the envelope into his pocket.
Outside, he didn’t see Jrae looking out the windows of her quarters at him as he crossed the compound. Had he known she was watching him, he might have straightened his posture a bit more and moved with more authority. Instead, his legs felt like he was walking through water, carrying a heavy load. He was hardly aware of the fact that thunder clouds were forming to the west and promising a storm before the night would end.
He entered the small corner of the officers’ quarters they called their club. Browning was nursing a drink, aerial photos and documents spread out on the table in front of him. Seeing Hollister, he raised his drink in invitation.
“No thanks, Brownie. I’ll have to take a rain check. I’ve got things to do and a rack that hasn’t seen me in it for too many hours,” Hollister said.
“Okay. But that rain check’ll be on you,” Browning said.
Hollister waved approvingly and slipped off to his room and closed the door behind him. Without stopping to take off his beret or even his pistol belt, Hollister unscrewed the top on the bottle of bourbon on his field table and poured himself a tall, straight shot—not quite a triple. He downed it in one swallow and poured himself another.
The approach and eventual departure of the thunderstorm went unnoticed by Hollister. He drank more of the bourbon and finished the last half of his pack of cigarettes.
Sometime before dawn, he was still awake, sitting in the same chair, looking out his small dirty window toward Cambodia.
He spent the night thinking of Susan and ignored the demands of the day ahead of him. He would start the day drained. He clenched his fists and released them, filled his lungs and said—under his breath: “Suck it up, Ranger.” He stood and stripped off his uniform.
The cold shower water was only warmed by a day’s worth of sun. During the night, the warmth would dissipate. That time of the morning, the single stream of water slapped him with a sudden shock. He dropped his head forward under the flow and let the icy water hit him on the back of his neck and tried to focus on his day.
The list of things that still had to be done was lengthy. He knew Thomas, Browning, and Easy were on top of everything, but also knew everything needed checking.
He recalled the maxim affixed to every vehicle in Germany when he was a Private First Class. It was one of Gen. Bruce C. Clarke’s favorite sayings: The troops do well what the commander checks.
Hollister didn’t much believe it when he was eighteen. But on his third tour in Vietnam and an equal number of combat assignments to long range patrol units, Hollister was sure it was a saying worthy of a tattoo.
Inside operations, Browning, Thomas, and Caulter were bent over a map they had tacked to a piece of plywood resting on the backs of a couple of folding chairs.
“Infiltrating them in without being discovered by trail watchers is going to be a trick,” Thomas said. “The rubber boats will go a long way to giving them speed and security.”
“If they don’t drown,” Hollister said. “How’s the boat training going?”
“I was just down at the river, and they look good,” Thomas said. “I guess you know Colonel Valentine isn’t happy about it though.”
Hollister made a disapproving face. It had been Michaelson’s idea to offer rubber boat training to the ARVN soldiers in one of the battalions that Valentine advised. The thinking was if the Americans practiced using boats the word would go out on grapevine that the Americans were practicing for a river operation. Staging boat training for the Vietnamese Army would look more routine.
“I’ll head on down to the river and see if Valentine is still there. If he is, I’ll try to calm him down,” Hollister said.
All four looked at the small marks indicating marshy areas, and the large number of veinlike blue lines indicating small streams and intermittent streams in the area.
“Let’s break pattern now with the aircraft. I want to fly up and down an area deeper than our objective
and parallel to the border. Shoot, conduct VRs, drop flares at night, overfly in the dark. Mix it up and pick it up. Let’s not telegraph our moves, but let’s not let the first thing into the area be our boat team insert ships.”
“Let ’em get a little tired of us, sir?” Caulter asked.
“Well, let them get used to hearing us thrash around like we’ re some kind of noisy grunt unit. As a matter of fact, let’s let them think that. Send some phony-ass plan over to Colonel Valentine’s CP that indicates we will be conducting recon patrols in the area—light ones—and that we’ll be backed up by the First Infantry Division. That’ll be sure to leak out to the jungle drums.”
“Then put some Big Red One markings on the choppers?” Thomas asked.
“You got it. They’ll figure we’re rooting around for someplace or somebody to drop a few infantry battalions on. They’ll be checking with their sources this side of the fence to see if Americans have moved any battalions to staging areas near the Angel’s Wing.”
“And until that happens, they won’t get froggy,” Caulter said.
“Right,” Hollister said.
Hollister pulled open his desk drawer and fished around for some aspirin to help his headache. Finding none, he walked over to Easy’s desk.
“You need Sergeant Easy, Dai Uy?” Jrae asked.
She startled him. He turned to her corner of the orderly room. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“No. That’s okay. Anyway, I’m looking for some aspirin.”
“Aspirin?” She gave him a puzzled look.
“As-pir-in.” He held his hand to his forehead. “You know—for a headache?”
“I will get you something,” Jrae said.
Hollister was finishing a letter to his parents when Jrae returned. She put a cup of hot tea on his desk. “This will help your head,” she said.
“What is it?” he asked, raising the steaming cup to his lips.
“Just drink,” she said.
He drank the bitter tea and soon realized the headache had eased. He got up and walked to the doorway—looking toward Jrae’s desk. “So what is this stuff?”
“From tree bark,” Jrae said.
He nodded. “Okay—tree bark.”
As she walked back to her desk, Hollister realized that the end of the war for the Americans would offer no better situation than she was in. In fact, she might be singled out for punishment or death if the North Vietnamese should conquer the south—which was more likely than not.
He wondered if there was some way he could get her out of the country before the Americans left for good. She wouldn’t have to go to America. Almost any other place in South Asia would be better than being a pretty Montagnard woman left behind.
He would put Brownie and Easy on it. They would be able to find someone in Thailand or the Philippines or even Japan who might find a place for her.
Hell, it was the least they could do for her.
CHAPTER 24
HE STOOD ON THE porch outside the headquarters and looked at the training Thomas and Caulter had set up. The compound resembled some alien planet. Rangers went about their business wearing gas masks in order to get used to the greater demand on their breathing.
Hollister realized he had talked a good game but not played one. His own mask was still in his office. He stepped off the porch and crossed the compound to a large building, once a maintenance shed. The windows had been blacked out for security reasons, and Thomas had set up sand tables inside.
Hollister entered the back door and stood against the wall to watch. Inside, Sergeants Chastain and DeSantis and Lieutenant Deming—each a heavy team leader—gathered their teams around separate sand tables. Every team member in the room was already sporting a few days of beard growth. It was the only place in the army where a soldier could go without a daily shave in garrison. It was common knowledge that the soaps and aftershaves were easily detected by the Viet Cong.
Each sand table had been sculpted into scale replicas of the objectives. The grid lines on the map were represented by strings nailed to the box frames, suspended in squares just inches above the simulated terrain. The trails were drawn in cornstarch from the mess hall. Trees and bushes were made from shredded packing material once used to ship radio equipment. And phase lines, objective markings, and other tactical control measures, normally grease-penciled in on a map, were drawn with pulverized, blue pool-table chalk found in the supply room.
Each man was represented by a Vietnamese piaster coin with his initials marked on it. And each rubber boat was simulated by a half a bar of GI soap wrapped in brown LRP ration packaging material.
Hollister watched each patrol leader coach his team through their actions, starting from the landing zone. Each man had to explain every move he would make through the objective and back to the pickup zone.
Everyone in the room knew the process was time consuming and often redundant, but it turned up problems and misunderstandings there—rather than on the ground. It was more than worth the time spent.
Hollister pulled Captain Thomas aside. “How’s Deming doing?”
“He’s really good, boss. This guy has enough bush time and common sense to make me happy. I’d go on one of his patrols.”
“Pretty good endorsement,” Hollister said.
“I think he’s a good choice,” Thomas said, referring to Hollister’s decision to give Deming’s team the most important tasks on the operation.
Hollister hoped by putting Deming’s team in near the enemy bunker and tunnel complex that his and a backup team could flush out permanent cadre working there and take them prisoner. The third team would act primarily as security to watch the backs of the other two teams.
Hollister’s worry was that either they would come up with a dry hole or the enemy forces would be large enough to overrun the Rangers. With the U.S. reluctance to escalate in Cambodia, he knew he had to make it surgical and effective or risk having to back out with his tail between his legs.
Satisfied the teams had understood their missions and were working out the details, Hollister left the building by the side door.
Outside, he found Sergeant First Class Young, the company intel sergeant, with two other Rangers, setting up a classroom for more training. “What’s planned here?” Hollister asked.
“Well, sir, we’re gonna teach these youngsters how to use”—the sergeant pulled a small camera from his pocket—“the Pen EE.”
Hollister smiled at the advertising pitchman pose Young struck.
Young turned his palm up and placed the camera on it. “Captain, this here camera is the Ranger’s friend. It’s a 35-millimeter, quick-loading, fixed-focus, easy-sighting, hand-operated, fully portable, half-frame, all-weather, black-and-white or color, manual intelligence-gathering device.”
“I got all that,” Hollister said. “But can our Rangers use it? Or, are we going to get rolls of blank film?”
Young put the camera down on one of the field tables. “Actually, all of our patrol leaders and a few others in the teams have used these cameras in Recondo School in Nha Trang. What I want to do is give them a brushup that’ll make them more comfortable with using them and keep us from getting back bad film.”
“Looks pretty dark in most places we’re sending these teams.” Young reached into a cardboard box on the table and pulled out a handful of film cans. “Got that covered. We were able to get high-speed black-and-white film—400 ASA.”
“What’s that mean? Will it help, and will it work?”
“It’ll work a lot better than the old film we’ve been used to.”
“I hope so. We get in there and find Indians, we’ll need all the proof we can get. I hope to avoid spending my nights answering congressional inquiries about why we were wandering around in Cambodia.”
“You’ll be able to publish this stuff in Life magazine.”
“I’m counting on you,” Hollister said.
“Let’s go over th
is again,” Hollister said. “We find nothing—we just walk away and try some other place, some other day?”
“That’s about it. We’re going on the big picture assembled by the whole intelligence community—your own input being some of the best of it,” Michaelson said. He leaned over and put his coffee cup down on the desk in his office at Long Binh.
“Will I still have the aircraft to pull my people out if we don’t find the brass ring?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m going to have thirty-six Rangers on the ground in a fairly small chunk of Cambodia. If this comes up as a dry hole, I want to be able to pull all thirty-six out as fast as if they were under fire. I don’t want to have to wait for helicopters.”
“I understand. I’ve already leaned on the colonel, General Quinn, and the aviation guys to dedicate the resources to your operation.”
“Okay. It’s real important to me.”
Michaelson relit his half-smoked cigar and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “So, how do you feel this one will go?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I can get a feel for it. This time I’m looking at the intel, and it says we’ll turn up something. Still, I just don’t feel it down deep,” Hollister said.
“Just promise me one thing,” Michaelson said.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll keep looking over your shoulder. Valentine is itching to get into a fight before this war’s over, and you don’t want to be part of it.”
“Got it.”
Rain blew through the compound and forced the inspections into the larger buildings. Hollister walked through the maintenance shed and found Deming’s team.
“How’s it going?”
Deming jabbed his thumb skyward. “We were laid out outside our hootch until this storm blew in. I figured we’d be better off taking dry gear in than wet. We don’t have time for everything to dry out before we launch tomorrow morning.”
“I agree. How’s your equipment?” Hollister asked.
“Would you like to take a look, sir?”