Into the Treeline

by John F. Mullins

  Under Fire

  Carmichael heard firing to his left, identified it by sound as an M-2 carbine and thus friendly. He was about to ask Captain Buon what had happened, when the whole world seemed to fall in on them. One second he was standing in a half-crouch with the only sound the wind sighing through the tall grass. Then he was pressing his face into the ground as the hundreds of sharp cracks of bullets passing impossibly close sounded in his ears. Bullets struck the ground in front of him, stinging his face with dust and gravel. He felt something jerking his pack, realized bullets were striking it.

  To his right he heard a gurgling noise, saw the striker who had been guarding his flank lying there with blood frothing from his mouth. Then two rounds struck the man in the top of his head, the sound like a sledgehammer hitting a pumpkin. They tore off a great chunk of skull and splattered brains and blood on the grass behind him, where they slowly dripped to the ground….

  “As only a veteran operations man can, John Mullins knows and understands how the Special Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency came together in the controversial Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. Articulate and forceful, Mullins gives the readers the facts.”

  —Mark Berent, bestselling author of

  Steel Tiger and Phantom Leader

  Also by John F. Mullins

  Napalm Dreams

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  A Pocket Star Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2004 by John F. Mullins

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0760-4

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-0760-4

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  To my wife, Charlene, who saw something in a big-eared, skinny young Special Forces soldier that no one else did, and who stuck with him. Forty-two years and counting!

  Chapter I

  Special Forces Lieutenant Jim Carmichael was moving through the elephant grass, getting cut to pieces. God, he hated the stuff. The leaves cut like tiny razors. Every exposed part of his body was covered by slashes. The individual cuts leaked only a little blood, but there were so many of them it looked as if he was sweating red. He wore sleeves rolled down and gloves stolen from an Air Force pilot but for all the good it did he might as well have been naked.

  He was moving far faster than he liked. No time to scout an area for danger before moving the bulk of the company into it. The best he could do was keep a point man ahead fifty meters. It was impossible to send out flankers in the dense grass; too much chance of loss of contact, and loss of contact carried with it the probability of getting into a firefight with your own people.

  Still, he had little choice. The brass had decreed that his company be on the day’s objective by a certain time, and the artillery had the nasty habit of shelling every place except where you were supposed to be. He’d had the unpleasant experience of being on the receiving end of “friendly fire” before. Friendly fire, isn’t.

  The handset clipped to his harness hissed. “Skipjack one, this is Sharkfin six, over.” Shit! he thought. What now? He answered the call.

  “What’s your situation, Skipjack?”

  “Continuing to move on Objective Sigma. Expect to reach it in approximately three-zero, over.”

  “You were supposed to be there by now. You’d better move your ass if you expect to get there before dark. Out.”

  Carmichael wished helicopters had never been invented. Sure they were great for Medevacs; he’d been glad enough for them when he’d been wounded. Sometimes, when used properly, they provided good fire support. But they also allowed field grade officers who should have been sitting far in the rear to fly overhead and harass the troops. Most of them had never had to walk this particular terrain, had no idea how long it took to move, tactically, from one point to another, and so made arbitrary decisions and expected the troops to carry them out. This was the first war in which tactical decisions were not being made by the junior leaders on the ground, and the results showed.

  He was damned if he’d try to move any faster. He cursed the fool who had dreamed up this operation in the first place. The lightly armed Montagnards, the hill people recruited, trained, and led by the Special Forces, were no match for the numerically superior North Vietnamese Army (NVA) forces who occupied the area. The only way to survive was to hide, beat the NVA at his own game, hit him when he wasn’t expecting it. That couldn’t be done if you constantly advertised your position with a chopper flying overhead.

  The first night after insertion he’d heard over the radio the results of what could happen when the NVA found you. The area the task force was supposedly surrounding had been divided into four equal sectors. Four companies had been inserted, his in the northwest sector. The company in the southeast had been hit shortly after insertion and within two hours had been effectively destroyed as a fighting force. Forty Montagnards and two Americans were killed and almost everyone else wounded. One of the Americans had been an old friend, one with whom he had served in the first tour. He listened on the radio as his friend died, bleeding to death as the high command apologetically told the surviving American that they couldn’t get anyone out, the LZ was just too hot.

  His company had, on the other hand, been very lucky. Apparently most of the NVA had been concentrated in the southern sectors. They only came across trail watchers, who they promptly killed, and the occasional courier. The couriers they attempted to capture, with a notable lack of success. The Montagnards really couldn’t understand why the Americans were so eager to take a Vietnamese alive and had a tendency to shoot them on sight. Northern Vietnamese, Southern, it didn’t matter to them; but they got in trouble with the Americans for shooting the Southerners.

  The documents taken from the dead couriers greatly troubled him. They indicated that the NVA was not suffering much from the almost incessant aerial and artillery bombardment. It was a big jungle and there were lots of places to hide. One report in particular worried him. It indicated that, while many of the battalions from the famed Yellow Star Division had already broken through the so-called cordon, there was still quite a large force somewhere to the north of his company.

  He supposed the present situation was his own fault. He had made the mistake of sharing the information with Major Walters, the “B” Team commander, who became quite excited at the prospect of his people finding the enemy and fixing them in place, supposedly the purpose of the operation. The major pushed the company to move ever faster, insisting that they catch the enemy before he got away. Never mind that at this speed they would probably stumble upon him. It was always easier to make decisions like that when you were flying overhead. You didn’t have to move through the stuff.

  Up ahead Jim saw one of the infrequent bare patches of ground upon which even the elephant grass refused to grow. He’d noticed several of them while flying to the insertion, four days ago. The grass would be smooth and green, rippling gently in the breeze. It gave no hint from above that it was ten or twelve feet high. Then holes like this one, looking like acne scars. The ’Yards thought such p
laces were haunted because people had died there. He wasn’t so superstitious. He attributed it to patches of overly alkaline soil, like the ones that popped up in the played-out cotton fields of his native Oklahoma.

  He moved to the edge of the open area and signaled the company to halt. Free of the elephant grass, he could finally see the objective. It looked ominous, a long finger of land poked obscenely into the valley, its top swathed in the eternal mist of the jungle. The elephant grass covered it halfway up, then disappeared abruptly into a wall of green. The trees rose two hundred feet into the sky, their canopies so tightly interwoven that little light could penetrate. Inside, he knew, would be a second canopy a hundred feet off the ground, this one composed of vines and creepers needing little light to survive, drawing their sustenance from the living flesh of the trees that shielded them from the sun. At ground level would be the ferns and thorn vines growing in an eternal twilight, intertwined around the giant fungi that when disturbed gave off a graveyard stench.

  He observed it for a few minutes, trying to figure a good way to approach. It didn’t look promising. For all he knew an entire battalion could be hiding up there. If he’d had a choice he would have bypassed it, spending a couple of days working around it and coming up from the rear. He didn’t have a choice.

  He walked back to where Sergeant First Class (SFC) Zack Osborne and the second platoon waited. Zack’s homely face crinkled into a smile as he saw Jim approach.

  “ ’Bout fuckin’ time you called a break, Trung Ui,” Zack said. “I figgered you was runnin’ a road race, fast as we was movin’. You sniff out a whorehouse up there?”

  “Nah,” Jim answered, dropping to the ground beside the burly sergeant. “A shitstorm, maybe, but no whorehouse. You know I can’t smell as good as you anyway. I don’t have the equipment.”

  Zack Osborne’s outsized nose had been for years a matter of discussion in the Special Forces. Some said that it was larger than his male member. Others said it took the place of it. Of course, nobody wanted him to be self-conscious about it. So they called him Hosenose.

  Zack rubbed his most outstanding appendage with care. “We don’t get out of this fuckin’ grass, this sumbitch is gonna be cut clear off. I’m about ready for this Chinese clusterfuck to be over. We ain’t lost, are we? I mean, you bein’ a lootenant and all!”

  All Special Forces NCOs believed it was foolish to trust any officer below the rank of captain with a map and compass, even if that officer, as was currently the case, was a first lieutenant who had been a Special Forces NCO for several years.

  “Glad you’ve got so much faith,” Jim said sourly. “You know the only thing worse than a second lieutenant with a map?”

  Zack indicated that, in his vast experience, the only thing worse was wet toilet paper.

  “Nope,” Jim said, “What’s worse is some sergeant standing behind that lieutenant and saying ‘You right, Sir!’ ”

  Zack grinned. The lieutenant had, in fact, offered him the chance earlier to lead the element but, truth be told, one goddamn mountain looked just like another in this goddamn place. And how the hell could you navigate through the grass? It was like being underwater.

  Jim pulled a worn map from the side pocket of his tiger-stripe pants and spread it on the ground.

  “The way I see it,” he said, “is that this finger would make a hell of a good fortified position; fields of fire in three directions, an escape route to the rear. Too damned narrow for us to hit head on; couldn’t deploy most of the company. How about if you take second and third platoons around to the right and come up just about right here?” He pointed to the spot with a twig. “If they’re up there, and I think they are, it’ll make them have to fight in two directions. What do you think?”

  Zack judiciously studied the map, taking his time before replying. Jim waited patiently. Had this been a conventional outfit, he would simply have given the order and expected it to be obeyed. Of course, Jim reflected, if it had been a conventional outfit he would have had no confidence that the order would be followed, or that the subordinate would be able to find his way to the designated point, or that he would attack once he got there. In Special Forces the officer didn’t so much lead as suggest. And the NCOs were perfectly justified in rejecting the suggestion if, in their professional opinion, it was a bad one.

  Zack finally grunted. “Looks okay to me. Gonna take me about an hour to get around there. You gonna be able to hold off shithead-in-the-sky that long?”

  Jim grinned, cracking the encrusted salty dirt on his cheeks. “I think I feel some radio problems coming on. Probably won’t be able to hear a thing until you call to tell me you’re in place.”

  He got up, muscles complaining from the movement. Must be getting old, he thought. He was twenty-six.

  At the front of the column the Montagnard company commander awaited him. Captain Buon was looking at the objective. “Beaucoup VC?” he asked.

  “Yes, I think maybe beaucoup VC,” Jim said. “Better get your people ready.” He explained his tactics.

  The captain smiled widely, showing his prized gold teeth with colored porcelain inlays. “We kill VC, number-ten goddamn sumbitch.” He chattered in Rhade to the runners, who set off down the column.

  Jim thought that the captain’s previous advisors had taught him well, in both tactics and language. No one had to teach the little Montagnard bravery. It was his fifth operation with Captain Buon and Jim thought he was one of the finest soldiers he had ever known. Each year the captain survived he added another gold tooth, achieving much status in his tribe. He loved fighting, the Americans, and his tribe, in that order. Who he fought made little difference. He would have dearly loved to kill some of the Vietnamese soldiers who had for so long oppressed his people. But the Americans insisted that he not do so, and out of respect for them he confined his killing to those of the North. They were Vietnamese, too, and while they had a shorter history of killing his people, they had made up for lost time. His father and mother had been among those reduced to blackened husks in the village of Ban Tleng when the NVA, irritated because the villagers couldn’t see the benefits of a socialist future, had brought in flamethrowers.

  Jim sat back-to-back with Captain Buon, checking his rifle. He liked the newly issued M-16, but paid heed to the old saying, “Remember that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.” All along the column the indigenous soldiers, small in stature but great in heart, were doing the same. First they ejected the round carried in the chamber and inserted a fresh one. Blew all specks of dust from the action, gave it a little extra squirt of gun grease. They opened the front left magazine pouch, checked the strips of tape affixed to the magazine to provide a grasping point to make sure the moisture hadn’t made them give way. They adjusted the red and green scarves, marking them as the 1st CIDG Company, Minh Long Strike Force, so that they could be clearly seen. The scarves were a source of pride as well as being a means of quick identification in the heat of a firefight.

  Jim called SFC Lally to the front. Lally was the replacement for the former heavy weapons man, who had been killed the month before. He had been another of Jim’s friends. The lieutenant often thought he was running damned low on friends. This was Lally’s first operation with the company.

  “George, I need you to keep the fourth platoon behind us in reserve,” Jim said. “Zack’s taking second and third around to the right. I’m going to go with Recon and First straight ahead. There’s not room for more than that on line and we don’t know what we’re gonna run into up there, so I’ll need some backup.”

  “How about me going with the assault and you following up, Boss? After all, you being a highly trained officer and all, I’d hate to see the taxpayers’ money get wasted if you get whacked.”

  “Sorry, buddy. Spirit of the Infantry, Follow Me! and all that shit. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to see a fucking thing if I stayed back there. Somebody’s got to and you’re elected.”

  Lally shrugged. “Your funeral.
” He moved off.

  In truth, though the suggestion had been tactically sound, Jim wouldn’t even consider not being in the front. Now that the time was near he felt the old familiar prickling of excitement. His heart was beating faster, skin felt feverish. His senses were heightened, vision was clearer, sounds were more sharp, the tiredness from the long march had gone away. He had never felt more alive. He wondered if something was wrong with him. He should have been feeling fear, and to a certain extent was, but it was a familiar fear, almost an old friend, and he welcomed it and the adrenaline rush it brought.

  It seemed forever before he heard the single code word spoken over the radio indicating that Osborne was in place. Mercifully, Major Walters had not bothered them in the interim. Perhaps he had been off irritating someone else.

  He gave the crank-up signal to Captain Buon, who grinned again and started forward, the soldiers fanned out in a ragged line to either side.

  They had advanced almost two hundred meters when the first shots were fired. A Montagnard point man, sighting a man in a khaki uniform through a break in the grass, loosed a full magazine at him. The man disappeared and the Montagnard advanced quickly, followed by several of his brethren.

  Jim heard the firing to his left, identified it by sound as an M-2 carbine and thus friendly. He was about to ask Captain Buon what had happened when the whole world seemed to fall in on them. One second he was standing in a half crouch with the only sound the wind sighing through the tall grass. Then he was pressing his face into the ground as the hundreds of sharp cracks of bullets passing impossibly close sounded in his ears, followed by the roar of the gunfire. Bullets struck the ground in front of him, stinging his face with dust and gravel. He felt something jerking his pack, realized bullets were striking it.

  To his right he heard a gurgling noise, saw the striker who had been guarding his flank lying there with blood frothing from his mouth. Then two rounds struck the man in the top of his head, the sound like a sledgehammer hitting a pumpkin. They tore off a great chunk of skull and splattered brains and blood on the grass behind him, where they slowly dripped to the ground.