by Dennis Foley
Dinh threw his tin rice cup at Rat. “This is not food. It is pig slop. You did not clean the rice. You did not wash the pot, and you did not cook it correctly.”
Rat made eye contact with Dinh, but said nothing. Still his insolent attitude was clear.
“Your people should have been wiped from our highlands centuries ago. Be warned. When we win our just victory over the puppets in Saigon, you will see your kind eliminated. You have no useful function.”
Rat refused to allow Dinh to anger him. Every time he did, it always resulted in punishment. He would be given the worst jobs on the repair crew. He would have to dig the holes for all to relieve their bowels. Then he would have to fill the holes and repair the vegetation so it would look as if no one had been there.
To Rat it was undignified for a man to attend to the sanitary needs of another man. He knew Dinh made him do it because there was no dirtier job he could give him. He had never killed a man, but when he thought of Dinh, it didn’t seem to him that it would be that difficult.
“Clean up this mess,” Dinh yelled. “I want to sleep, and I want not to have to smell your foul, burned rice.”
Rat didn’t say anything. Instead, he crawled across the floor of the underground room and picked up the bits of rice.
Rat pulled back the crude wooden panel fashioned as a light and smoke baffle at the entrance to the tunnel. All he needed to do was to move beyond that and then separate the bushes that covered the opening, and he would be free of the tunnel.
Outside, in the dark, he stood motionless for a few minutes to absorb the freedom and the fresh smell of the night air. He looked up at the navy-colored sky filled with tens of thousands of crisp stars. The sky and the smell of the breeze after it had passed through the trees reminded him of his childhood. He would go out at night with his father to hunt night creatures. He missed his father, his family, and his way of life. He tried to push the thoughts of how miserable he was from his mind and enjoy the moment.
He looked back toward Vietnam and wondered if there were any of his people left alive. He had been gone so many years. He could only assume the Vietnamese had continued to come to his tiny village to take the grown boys and men. The loss of all the men in the village meant the women were left to work the fields, hunt, cook, and defend themselves. He knew the likelihood of the women being able to do that for any length of time was minimal.
Rat put the grass basket of tunnel waste behind a clump of brush. He would bury it in the morning when he could see to dig. Dinh wouldn’t let him keep the garbage in the tunnel during the night. In the morning, Rat would bring out more human waste and cans of urine that had accumulated during the night. After he buried it all, he would join the others in the work party to finish repairing a small bridge.
He looked at the horizon for any sign that the day might be cooler for him. But the trees were too tall for him to venture a guess based on his reading of the wafer-thin line separating the earth from the heavens.
He took one last breath of fresh air and reentered the hole.
Hollister left the maps spread out on the desk in his room and walked to his bunk. He lit a cigarette and then pulled his grease pencil from his shirt pocket. On the wall next to the bunk, he began to draw the schematic of the upcoming operation. It helped him burn a picture in his mind of the important control measures, the major terrain features, and the relative positions of the teams on the ground.
The picture was simple. Two major streams joined just inside Cambodia to form a larger river. In the V created by the junction, the North Vietnamese work parties had created a way station, rest area, and tunnel complex. The tunnel network allowed them to hide from aerial observation, shelter themselves from bombardment, and stage work parties to keep the parallel trails and fords open for the arriving units.
The Rangers would insert three large teams and move to the objective area by rubber boats. Once in position, two teams would set up ambush-snatch sites along the paths paralleling the streams. The third would work its way to a point upwind of the complex and saturate the tunnels with tear gas.
Hollister hoped someone from the complex could be flushed out and captured. Prisoners would provide information and confirmation of the function of the way station. With that information, it would be a simple matter for higher headquarters to justify mounting a more conventional assault on those bunkers, putting them out of business.
Hollister had to remind himself and his Rangers that their purpose was not to destroy the complex or inflict maximum casualties. Rather, it was to capture as many prisoners as they could.
He stepped back from the drawing and looked at it for a long time. He wanted to fix the relationships of the sketch in his mind. He would need to call on his memory in the darkness and in moments of extreme pressure for a decision or an answer from him. He wouldn’t always have the luxury of pulling out his map to orient himself.
Convinced he had memorized the diagram, Hollister took a towel from the foot of his bunk and wiped the lines from the plywood wall. He heard himself say, “God—let this one go off well.”
Hollister stood in the quiet compound and lit his second cigarette of the day. He surveyed the eastern sky for signs of sunrise. The blackness of the earth was separated from the blue-black sky by a line of teal.
Just then the door to the showers opened, and Jrae stepped out, wrapped in a salvaged nylon poncho liner. She had pulled her wet hair back from her face and tied it in a knot. It was the first time Hollister had seen how long and thin her cranelike neck was and how prominent her cheekbones were.
“Jrae?”
His voice startled her.
He pulled back the cuff of his jungle fatigue shirt and checked his watch—it wasn’t even four A.M. yet.
“Good morning, Captain,” she said, shuffling her things and pulling the ragged poncho liner material tightly across her chest.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh yes. I am fine, Captain.”
“Isn’t this kind of early for you?”
“We only have one shower house here, Captain. If I am to clean myself, I must find a time when the soldiers are not there. This is that time.”
“We’ll see what we can do about getting you some more privacy.”
“That will be very nice, Captain.”
“Is everything else okay for you?”
“Everything else?” Jrae repeated, unsure.
“How are you getting along here?” Hollister asked.
“Getting along?” Jrae said, puzzled by the term.
“I mean, are you okay? Is everyone treating you well? Ah …” He searched for some easy way to describe it. “Are you happy here?”
She pointed off to the north. “You know, Captain, that I come from the mountains. Many in my family were killed by the VC and the Republicans. I am alone now. I do not think anyone is alive now. Here I am fed, and I have a job, and I do not feel afraid.”
“I think it’s very important you don’t feel afraid. If you have that, you have a chance to work out everything else. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes. I think so,” Jrae said. “I must go make ready for work now. I do not want to lose my job.”
“Do you like your job?”
“I have so much to learn. I do not understand everything. But Sergeant Easy and the other soldiers treat me better than when I was at the camp. I like my job, Captain.”
“Well, we like having you here. And I want you to feel comfortable and want you to know you can come to me if you have any problems.”
“Thank you very much, Captain.”
Hollister watched her walk away. She moved gracefully, and the fresh smell of her lingered in his nostrils. He realized how long it had been since he had been that close to a woman. He missed the feeling.
Rat woke, shivering from the cold and damp that had seeped into his body while he slept. His nose was clogged with the dirt from the tunnels and soot from the oil lamps. He slowly straightened his le
gs and searched for the feeling to come back to his toes and fingertips.
It was hard for Rat to tell what time it was with no way to see the sky. He knew if he went back to sleep, it was possible he might sleep too long, and Dinh would wake him and begin screaming at him.
He picked his way to the tunnel shaft that led to the outside. There he had to get back down on his hands and knees to crawl up the angled shaft. As he worked his way through the long, dark, earthen tube, he stopped often to sweep the debris from his neck and hair. In the dark, it was impossible for him to tell if it was only dirt, roots, and pebbles, or the huge poisonous centipedes that were everywhere in the tunnels. He had been stung before. It had made him sick and feverish. The potions his mother brewed from the bark of elder and comfrey roots only relieved the pain for a few minutes. He knew if he was to encounter another centipede, he wouldn’t even be able to find that much relief. Even if he knew how to prepare the poultice his mother had made, Dinh would never allow him to stop working long enough to brew it.
Within ten meters of the entrance, Rat could smell the promise of fresh air. Somewhere else in the tunnel complex a vacuum existed that drew the cool, fresh, outside air into the shaft.
Rat moved a few feet and then turned to pull the cans of urine and baskets of waste forward. Then he repeated the process, over and over, until he reached the entrance.
It took Rat two trips from the tunnel entrance to carry all of the garbage to the site he had selected to bury the waste. He knelt down to dig, and felt the pain in his legs. He wasn’t sure if it was just soreness from the cold tunnels or if he had just worn out his knees doing all of the digging, carrying, and hauling he had done in the years he had been a slave of the North Vietnamese. He rubbed his legs and tried to find something pleasant to think about while he finished digging the hole. His small hand spade had a split in the wooden handle that pinched the palm of his hand if he didn’t take care to avoid trapping his flesh in its grip.
Inside operations was a hive of activity. Patrol leaders were picking up the latest weather data. Pilots made last-minute coordination.
Hollister entered and walked directly to Loomis. He picked up the duty officer’s log and read the new entries from the night before. Colonel Valentine had called operations to ask why he didn’t yet have a copy of the operations overlay. Hollister reached for a cigarette and lit it.
“Call province and pass the word to Colonel Valentine’s office that we sent everything his headquarters needs yesterday.”
Captain Thomas looked up from the map he was studying on the far end of the radio bench. “Sir, we didn’t send him an overlay.”
“I know. ‘Everything he needs’ doesn’t include our fucking overlay.”
Thomas made a face.
“I know. It’s quibbling. But I’d rather have him take a bite out of my ass for that than have our overlay floating around province headquarters for every fucker under five foot six to see and discuss or even sell.”
Hollister looked around the room at the large number of Rangers coming and going. He checked his watch. It was 0428. “We’re lifting off in thirty-two minutes, folks. Need I say anything more?”
Everyone in the room acknowledged Hollister’s comment and picked up the pace of their activity. The pilots were the first to leave.
Suddenly the sounds of the cocks and the morning birds went silent. Rat felt it before he heard the silence. He put down his hand spade and looked up. Off to the southeast, he heard the approach of helicopters. He watched them for a few moments and decided they were headed somewhere south of him.
When they got nearly due south of the tunnel complex they began circling, dropping flares, and firing at something on the ground.
Dinh stepped out of the tunnel. “What is happening?”
Rat pointed off to the choppers. “They must have discovered something there.”
Dinh let out a laugh. “How foolish they are. That area we abandoned in 1968. There is nothing but empty training huts and a trail intersection there. They are so stupid.”
Rat didn’t speak. For a fleeting moment, he hoped the choppers would come their way and catch Dinh out in the open.
“I am going to eat. Hurry. You have many things to do below,” Dinh said before crawling back into the tunnel entrance.
Hollister looked down the length of the runway outside the compound wire. Fourteen choppers stood at flight idle, finishing runup procedures.
Next to the lift choppers, the teams had stacked their carry-in loads while they underwent final personal inspections only yards away from their assigned birds.
Hollister tried to identify the team members. But in that light, it was hard—made even more difficult by the expert application of camouflage stick. The final confusion was created by the fourteen rotating beacons on the tops of the choppers that painted and repainted the area with red lights.
It was the largest Ranger lift he had ever mounted, and Hollister was more than a little worried about the complexities of the operation ahead.
Across the runway from the slicks, four Cobras and an armed loach stood ready to protect the insert package. Somewhere between Bien Hoa and Tay Ninh, an OV-10 was en route to provide forward air control support. The ground crew and fuel tanker for the sophisticated air force spotter plane were already set up near the maintenance area.
Chief Adams walked up behind and fell into step with Hollister. “Morning, sir. You ready to lift off yet?”
Hollister had decided earlier not to put all of his command and control personnel in one chopper. Thomas and Gannon were going in the C & C, coordinating the inserts. He’d opted to take Adams’s loach and oversee the entire insert.
He had spent very little time inside an OH-6A and none of it in the front seat. Chief Adams belted himself into the right seat and began his preflight checklist before Hollister got fully buckled into the left.
Hollister looked around the cramped cockpit of the small chopper. Compared to the Huey slick, it was half its height, half its length, had half as large a rotor disk, but could cruise through the treetops at 150 miles an hour—just about the same speed as the Huey. It only took a few minutes of watching a skilled loach pilot maneuver one to agree it was the sports car of helicopters.
Hollister watched as Adams ran up the turbine and rotor RPM and then signaled his crew chief outside to leave his post acting as a lookout to warn people about the eight-foot-high rotor blades.
The crew chief got into the chopper and put his machine gun across his lap. He pressed the transmit button on the drop cord running to his helmet. “Clear to the rear, Chief.”
Adams pressed the left pedal, pulled up on the collective, and scanned the instruments. Satisfied the chopper was ready, he announced, “Coming up.” The tiny chopper almost leaped from the ground. Its whispering rotor blades made the motion seem effortless.
The young pilot took up a left orbit over the airfield to allow Hollister to survey the flight of fifteen as it lifted off for Cambodia.
Hollister slipped the lip mike nearer to his mouth and checked the frequency of the radio on the console. It was the Juliet Company tactical net. “Three. This is Six. How ’bout a sitrep?”
Thomas came back without hesitation. “This is Three. We’re about thirty seconds from skids up.”
“Roger. I’ll take up a slot on the left side of your flight but out of the way. I’ll be close if you need me. Good luck.”
“Thanks, boss,” Thomas said.
The loach had hardly made half an orbit when Hollister saw the gunships lift off. The slicks rolled forward and up. And the pilots took up a flight formation a thousand meters to the rear of the gunships.
“Okay, Chief. Let’s get up alongside and try not to get ourselves run over,” Hollister said.
The young pilot nodded and rolled the chopper on its nose, sucking the collective up toward his armpit while pushing forward on the cyclic. The loach picked up speed and quickly closed the gap with the larger formation.
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Once he leveled off, Adams reached down and punched the button on a tiny reel-to-reel tape recorder Hollister hadn’t noticed earlier. Immediately the headsets in all three helmets came alive with Cream singing, “In a white room with black curtains …”
Adams looked over at Hollister for his reaction and found him smiling at the energetic scout pilot.
To Hollister it was loach music if there ever was any.
The flight to the objective area went off without complication. Hollister watched the flickering morning lights peek from the houses and businesses along the route. After less than five minutes, there were no more lights. They crossed over the no-man’s-land between populated Vietnam and the Cambodian border.
To the southwest, Hollister could see the flight of six other helicopters, a forward air controller, an AC-47 gunship, and three Cobras.
The AC-47 dropped parachute flares while the Cobras prowled the treetops—firing bursts of miniguns and rockets.
They were shooting at nothing. Hollister and Michaelson knew they wouldn’t be able to insert six chopper loads of Rangers without it being noticed by enemy forces on the ground. The solution was to execute a feint just a mile and a half south of the bunker complex as a distraction. While the show was taking place, Hollister’s Rangers would slip into two landing zones twelve miles north and west of the bunkers.
Hollister hoped the feint was enough to focus attention on itself and cover the sounds of the three Ranger teams swinging wide to the north at treetop level.
As Hollister’s flight crossed the border, the pilots turned off their navigation lights and picked their way through the gentle terrain in the long shadows created by the flares.
Watching the ground rush by only twenty feet below the loach’s skids, and flying blacked out, Hollister recognized the chance of collision they faced. The patches of light and dark played tricks on pilots and made it difficult to navigate.
The Ranger flight arced north, crossed the two large streams, hooked back around to the south and then east as they approached their landing zones. Two miles out, the formation split into a flight of one and a flight of two Ranger teams. The first insert on the westernmost stream would put in Deming’s and Chastain’s teams.