Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  “What do you see?” Bratcher yelled. Fernandez’s comments were muffled.

  Woolley told Bratcher to pull him out.

  When he came out and got to his feet, dirt was caked on his fatigue jacket and on his face where the sweat had run down. Someone gave him a cigarette and he talked quickly to Castro.

  Turning to us, Castro said Fernandez didn’t like going down the hole.

  “Well, fuck him! What did he see?” Bratcher asked.

  “A lot of hole. Just hole. Some spent casings, but just the hole going on out that way,” Castro said, pointing to our front.

  “They are ahead of us,” I said. “Waiting.”

  “There’re tunnels here. Maybe that’s why they’ve been so successful in this area,” Woolley said.

  We ate lunch before moving out. A short time later we received sniper fire. At mid-afternoon one of Arthur’s men, behind us, stepped on a mine and blew his foot off. He was evacuated, and we were on our way again within the hour.

  For two days we patrolled west. We encountered more mines and snipers; sullen, menless villages; and more spider holes leading down into tunnel complexes. There was a different sense to the jungle here than we had experienced in other places. It was quieter, and seemed more deadly. When we stopped occasionally to get our bearings or to rest, we heard no sounds—no birds flying or chirping, no insects humming. We felt someone was watching us all the time.

  As we moved into a company defensive perimeter around a small field the third night of the operation, Major Allee arrived on the supply helicopter with small revolvers, field telephones, and spools of wire. He told us what we had already realized—we were walking over an extensive network of tunnels. They were unexpected and had not been part of the intelligence package for this operation. The spider holes were openings to the tunnels, and Allee told us to investigate them wherever we found them. They were enemy sanctuaries. We were to send down a small man, a tunnel rat, with a pistol, flashlight, and telephone. Someone was to feed the wire down as the tunnel rat explored. The man in the hole should send back situation reports every five minutes or so. He could find his way back by following the wire.

  Pete led his recon platoon by our area the next morning on their way to a village off to our south. He stopped for a cup of coffee and said that a group of men from the colonel’s battalion headquarters group had gone down a hole the previous night. They had run into VC in the tunnels and had a running battle. They got back by following the telephone wire; however, one man had not returned. Pete had no idea what had happened to him.

  “Tunnel ratting, is that infantry duty?” I asked.

  Pete stood up after finishing his coffee and told his men to saddle up. I told him to be careful. He turned toward me and smiled.

  “Your mother said that, be careful, I heard her,” I said. “Me, I’d rather have it the other way. You die, I’m a rich man.”

  “There’s something on that insurance I need to talk with you about, when we have a chance,” Pete mumbled.

  “What?” I asked, suddenly uncomfortable. I was the one who needed to talk about the insurance; I had yet to find the change of beneficiary form.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Company A continued sweep operations that morning. Snipers pinged at us, and we encountered mines and more tunnels. Cu Chi was not friendly.

  The battalion came together at mid-afternoon with plans to dig in and spend a couple of days licking its wounds. We had been on the move almost constantly for three days and had slept very little. The men were grouchy with fatigue. We welcomed the opportunity to rest, receive mail, and eat hot food.

  When my platoon tied up with Arthur’s on the left, Spencer, Bratcher, and I sought a central position in the rear to drop our gear and dig a small hole. Woolley came up as we were removing our packs and asked me to take a few of my men and do a “cloverleaf” patrol—make a short circle out about five or six hundred meters from the perimeter—to ensure that we hadn’t inadvertently camped next to a VC position.

  The men grumbled as they dropped webbing not needed for the patrol. I left a few men behind to begin digging in and the rest fell in behind Lyons, who was followed by Beck and King. We moved out to a small clearing a hundred meters to our front. The setting sun cast long shadows and made it hard to see the opposite side clearly, so we skirted it.

  The jungle woods were not thick and Lyons walked along briskly but cautiously. We were all anxious to get back. Suddenly Lyons stopped and raised his hand. Because the area was so open, most of the men dropped to one knee. Beck, his M-79 at the ready, continued to walk forward beside Lyons. I remained standing with several men back in the patrol, but I could see the two point men squinting ahead in the jungle.

  Finally, Beck turned around and said in a loud whisper. “Looks like a plane.”

  I scowled as I walked to the head of the column. However, I could see something metallic reflecting the setting sun in a bamboo thicket ahead. It was long and cylindrical and covered with vines. Incredibly, but clearly, it was a small plane, minus the wings.

  Lyons, Beck, and I approached the thicket one slow step at a time. The plane could be the bait to a trap. When I could read the number on the tail, I called it out to Spencer and told him to report that we had found spotter aircraft apparently shot down some time ago, but we were moving on and would come back and check it in the morning.

  We saw no sign of the wings, wheels, or propeller. Beck guessed that the plane had crashed somewhere else and been hidden in the thicket. I pointed out that the fuselage looked intact and there didn’t appear to be any evidence of a crash landing.

  Beck said he was going to look inside, but I told him no—too much of a chance that it was booby-trapped. Plus, we had only a few more minutes of daylight. If we didn’t move on it would be dark before we got back to the perimeter. I motioned the patrol around to the right of the thicket. As King came by, Beck and Lyons fell back in at point.

  A small clearing was behind the thicket, and a three-foot-high dirt berm ran out of the jungle along the east side of the field. Spencer was coming up the column to walk behind me. King was turning around as he walked and asked me what the hell a berm was doing coming out of the jungle like that, when an automatic weapon opened up from our right. Rounds zinged between King and me.

  Everyone hit the ground. Manuel was carrying the machine gun, and I yelled at him to start shooting. Short bursts of fire continued to come at us from over the berm. We crawled forward. Bratcher was at the end of the patrol. As I reached the berm I yelled for him to move out, flanking whoever was firing to the right; we’d cover him.

  Bratcher yelled for Sgt. Ollie Taylor Jr. to follow him. I told Manuel to bring the machine gun to the top of the berm. He stood up and fired from the hip. The rest of us slung our guns over the top and fired.

  Beck fired his M-79 grenade launcher. The round hit an overhanging tree limb, bounced back, and landed squarely in his lap. Beck screamed, expecting the grenade to go off.

  Bratcher was maneuvering in from the right. He yelled for us to stop firing. He and Taylor advanced, firing as they went. Bratcher yelled, “We got him! I saw him go down.”

  As I was waving the men over the berm, King turned to look at Beck. His mouth open and eyes wide, Beck was staring at the grenade in his lap.

  “You lucky motherfucker,” King said scornfully. “The round has to travel fifteen yards to arm itself. It didn’t go fifteen yards. It ain’t armed. It ain’t going off. Pick it up and put it on the ground beside you.”

  From the other side of the berm we could see that the firing had come from beneath a couple of shelters, each just four posts holding up palm-frond roofing and no sides. Bratcher and Taylor were moving in from our right, and the rest of us came straight in, with Manuel occasionally firing the machine gun.

  We saw that the ground under the roof of the larger shelter had been excavated, leaving a pit perhaps five feet deep by fifteen feet wide
by twenty feet long. A trench led from the main shelter to a similar pit under the smaller one.

  Expecting to see the VC lying in the bottom of the hole, we covered the last few feet very slowly, guns at the ready.

  Behind us, Beck still hadn’t moved and was telling King, “Maybe, maybe, maybe the round’s only gone fourteen yards and something. Maybe I pick it up and, and, and, that’s enough.” He was trying not to breathe hard for fear of disturbing the round lying on his stomach. He took short breaths and talked as he exhaled.

  “Help me, Sergeant, help me move it.” Beck looked up at King. “Nope,” King said, leaning against the berm. “You can do it as well as I can. You either slap it off and roll out of the way quick, or you reach down very carefully and lift it off.”

  “Tell the lieutenant to come here,” Beck said.

  King looked over the berm in my direction. I was easing up to the shelter. The sun was almost down, and it was hard to see into the hole. Bratcher and Taylor reached the edge first.

  “He’s gone, the son of a bitch, down a fucking hole,” Bratcher said.

  A pool of blood lay next to the forward edge of the hole under the main shelter. An AK-47 assault rifle was nearby amid some empty casings and dark green cotton pouches holding AK-47 magazines. A blood trail led over to a spider hole in the corner, like the drain in a sink. Taylor, standing by the smaller shelter, said he saw another spider hole there.

  “He’s down in that hole, probably down in a little room between these two shelters. Wounded. Without his gun,” I said.

  The radio on Spencer’s back squawked as Woolley asked what all the firing was about. From the far side of the berm I heard King call out, “Lieutenant, you got a minute?”

  I told Spencer to tell Woolley that we wounded a VC and that we were going to try and ferret him out of a hole. Didn’t know how long it was going to take.

  King called again, insistently, “Lieutenant.”

  I told Bratcher to see what King wanted and told De Leon and Ayers to move out to a guard position near the small field. After sending some other men to protect our other flank, I walked over to the smaller shelter, where Taylor was shining his flashlight down the spider hole. It led down and away. We tied a small piece of nylon cord to the flashlight and lowered it down the hole.

  Meanwhile, Bratcher had walked back to the berm. King nodded toward Beck, who was sitting awkwardly with the M-79 grenade round in his lap and a sick look on his face.

  “Lift it off, Beck,” Bratcher said firmly. Like King, he saw no value in putting two men at risk.

  Beck’s hand shook slightly as it moved slowly to the round. When he lifted it with two fingers, the head of the round rotated downward. Beck opened his mouth as wide as he could, as though he were going to yell, but he didn’t drop the round. Moving it slowly to his right and then toward the ground, he rolled out of the way as he set it down. Quickly he got to his feet and looked down at the small metal ball.

  “You son of a bitch. You goddamned son of a bitch. You nasty little son of a bitch,” he kept repeating as he climbed over the berm. Beck borrowed Patrick’s M-16 and went back to the berm. He fired most of a clip of ammo at the M-79 round until he finally set it off.

  Thinking we were being probed or attacked, I turtled my neck and started to jump into the pit when Bratcher said, “No problem. It’s just ‘Bad News’ Beck.”

  Spencer had finished sending the radio message to Woolley and was looking down the spider hole under the main shelter. He mentioned that he could see the light from Taylor’s flashlight shining at the bottom of the hole. Woolley came back on the radio and said that battalion wanted us to take the man alive. They wanted a prisoner. I told him we’d do what we could.

  Convinced that a dying VC was beneath us, I told Fernandez that it was time for his starring role again, to get a pistol, and to get ready for a trip down the mine shaft.

  Fernandez did not take it well. He was angry and mumbled in Spanish under his breath. I told him I was sorry, but he was the smallest and had to go. He pretended to not understand me.

  By now the sunlight was almost completely gone. I told Bratcher to ensure that the men were set up in good guard positions all around the shelters. As I went under the small shelter, we started to receive small-arms fire from across the field.

  We ducked down. Looking closely at the spider hole, Fernandez started saying, “No, no, no.”

  Sitting with my back against the side of the larger hole, I was suddenly very tired. I wanted to be back with the battalion, eating my C rations and maybe drinking a cup of coffee. I did not want to be beside the entrance to that hole that led to God knows where. We knew only that at least one wounded VC soldier was down there.

  We received more probing rounds from the area near the plane and then some rounds to our front, from deep in the jungle. The VC were all around us.

  I grabbed Fernandez by the collar of his fatigue jacket and told him not to get me angry. He kept saying, “No, no, no.”

  Finally I said, “Ah shit.” I told Spencer to throw a grenade down the hole under the large shelter, and I took a grenade off my web gear, pulled the pin, and dropped it down the other hole where I was standing. It wasn’t necessarily going to give us a live prisoner, like battalion wanted, but my reluctant Puerto Rican tunnel rat wasn’t going down the hole until we did something.

  The grenades went off with muffled thuds. We lowered Taylor’s flashlight down the hole again, and Spencer said he could see the light shining dimly from the other area.

  I looked at Fernandez and said, “Okay, friend. Time to go to work. Go down the hole.”

  He gave me a long, angry look. Then he took off his web gear, retrieved Taylor’s flashlight, checked the magazine in his pistol, crossed himself, and crawled over to the spider hole. After looking inside it for several moments, he went over the edge and was quickly gone, head first.

  Almost immediately Spencer said that he could see the tunnel rat’s light. I kept expecting to hear a shot.

  Fernandez popped back up near me. He said something I couldn’t understand and then disappeared down the hole again. Within a minute he appeared in the spider hole under the large shelter where Bratcher and Spencer were sitting.

  Occasionally bullets whistled through the shelters from all sides. They made startlingly loud sounds when they crashed through the palm fronds.

  I crawled over to Spencer, who was holding a flashlight as Fernandez began drawing a diagram in the dirt of what he had seen underground. The spider hole under the small shelter was connected to the spider hole in the large area, and from there the tunnel led away to the west. The blood trail led down this tunnel. Fernandez said the tunnel curved and he had not been able to see how far it went, but there was a lot of blood in there.

  The VC probably had sat near the spider hole, perhaps to bandage his wound. He had probably been there when we were talking with Woolley. Maybe he had stayed until we first dropped the flashlight down the hole. Even now he could be right around the edge of the bend.

  I told Bratcher that I was going down. About then Beck came crawling up to the shelter and asked if we had gotten the VC in the hole. I told Bratcher that Beck would go with me. Beck said okay.

  Taking off my web gear and steel pot, I took the flashlight and pistol from Fernandez. I crawled to the spider hole and shined the flashlight down. It was about four or five feet to the floor of the tunnel. I could see the opening on one side back to the small shelter and, on the other side, the opening as it went down and away.

  I went over the side head first and caught myself with my hands on the bottom. Shining the flashlight down the tunnel, I could see the blood trailing out of sight around the bend. I came back out of the hole and went in feet first. Going down to my knees, with my feet back inside the tunnel toward the small shelter, I bent down and into the tunnel. I was suddenly enclosed in a solid earthen tomb. Sounds from above were muted. I felt as though I were in another dimension. Everything was quiet, cool,
and very confined. With the blood trail and bend ahead, I faced the real prospect of a deadly, subterranean confrontation at any moment. Holding my finger on the trigger of the pistol in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I crawled slowly forward. Beck landed with a thud behind me and clawed ahead quickly until one of his hands grabbed one of my feet.

  When I came to the bend I inched around it, pistol first. I expected to see the wounded VC at any moment, but about thirty feet ahead the tunnel came to an abrupt end.

  There was no VC in sight.

  I lay down and looked at the end of the tunnel. It looked as if people had maneuvered around the area often, coming and going, their bodies wearing off the loose dirt and rounding out the sides. My first thought was that a hole at the end led up and out—the tunnel must be an escape route away from the shelters. Once I reached the end, I might find myself coming out of the tunnel into a nest of VC, or coming out near one of our guard positions and being shot by my own men.

  “Where da’ fuck did he go?” Beck said behind me.

  “I think up and away,” I said as I got back to my hands and knees and inched farther down the tunnel.

  The air was stuffy. I could smell my own body odor and Beck’s. I did not like the confinement and wished as I inched along that I had not invited Beck. He blocked any escape and seemed to close off the tunnel behind me. As I moved along my world became smaller and smaller.

  Every few feet, I stopped crawling and lay down to study the tunnel end. As I came closer I saw that there was no hole going up. The end was a round circle, with no opening at the top. On the floor I saw what looked like a toilet seat, but it proved to be a hinged door.

  “No,” I said to Beck, “I don’t think he went up and away, I think he went down.”

  I continued to look at the trapdoor, in the hope of divining a course of action that was safe. Why a door? What was underneath? Was it filled with VC? Was it booby-trapped? In the flashlight beam it looked liked the gate to hell. I wished I had more air to breathe.