“Keep shooting!” Kirkwood yelled at O’Connor, who had ducked below the parapet of the fighting hole when a sixty-millimeter round exploded a few feet from his side of their sandbagged nest. “They’re trying to suppress our fire with the mortars so they can overrun us.”
“Something’s wrong over there with King Rat and the boys,” O’Connor said, noticing that now only one rifle fired sporadically from that position. “Keep shooting man, I gotta go take a look. We need that machine gun to stop the sappers.”
Terry O’Connor rolled out the back of the small bunker and raced the twenty yards to the next hole on his belly. As he got closer, he could see smoke rolling out of a jumble of sandbags and broken lumber.
“Jon, keep shooting!” O’Connor yelled, climbing around the debris and pulling it from the hole. “They got hit bad over here!”
In the bottom of the hole, Henry lay moaning, blinded from the mortar blast. King Rat had fallen limp on top of the machine gun. Elvis had taken shrapnel across the right side of his face and neck. His skin, wet with blood, was speckled with black. He alone managed to fire his rifle.
“Rat, Henry, you guys need to sit tight,” O’Connor said. “Jon’s got help coming pronto. Meanwhile, Elvis, we need that machine gun. Help me get it over to the other hole.”
“Rat might be dead,” Elvis said as he pulled the limp body from atop the machine gun and shoved it out to O’Connor.
“Nothing we can do right now except pray,” O’Connor told Elvis, pulling the heavy weapon to his side and grabbing two cans of belted ammunition for it. “Can you help me drag the rest of the ammo with the gun? We’ll move it to our hole; that way Charlie may leave these guys alone.”
“Yes, sir, I just can’t hear very good and I can only see out my left eye, but I can hump ammo for you,” Elvis said, climbing out of the debris of the fighting hole with three cans of ammunition in his clutches.
“Rat! You and Henry lay quiet! Help’s coming!” O’Connor shouted down in the hole.
“Yeah, man, we cool,” a voice from the bottom answered.
DOC HAMILTON SAW the movement first and nudged Jimmy Sanchez, who, seeing the silhouette figure easing toward him, sat up from where he had lain and waved.
“Viper made good time off that hill,” Sanchez said, turning back toward where Tommy McKay and Doc Hamilton lay on their bellies next to their radioman, Lance Corporal Sneed.
Suddenly four other silhouettes broke through the thick undergrowth, and Doc Hamilton reached for Jimmy Sanchez, who still sat up with his back turned toward the oncoming dark figures. Before he could pull the lieutenant down, a burst of rifle fire snapped at them, throwing the reconnaissance platoon commander on his face.
As soon as he saw the muzzle flash from the enemy’s weapon, Tommy the Touchdown McKay opened fire with his AR15, sending his first bullet into the head of the man who had just shot his best friend. Bobby Sneed took out two of the four other North Vietnamese soldiers who attacked from behind the leader whom McKay had killed. The remaining two fell back as the lawyer lieutenant emptied his rifle’s magazine at them.
“Shit, man,” Jimmy Sanchez said, coughing blood and gasping for air as he began to writhe on the ground. “I’m lung-shot.”
“We’ll have to carry him,” Doc Hamilton said. “Can’t do much for him sitting here. We’ve gotta get him on a med-evac chopper as fast as we can.”
McKay looked at Sanchez, feeling his heart tie up in his chest as his friend gasped to breathe, trying to talk but only able to mouthe a few words as Doc Hamilton dosed him with morphine, and with a bloody finger drew an M on the lieutenant’s forehead. Then the corpsman turned the officer on his stomach, and pulled up his blouse and T-shirt. Finding the three entries made by the bullets, he rolled wads of gauze bandages tight and stuffed them into the holes, plugging them so that air no longer sucked through the wounds.
“That’s the best I can do for now, Snake Man,” Doc Hamilton told the lieutenant as he eased him on his back and sat him up. “Plugging the holes should help you pull in air a little easier. I know it’s not a fix. You’re just going to have to deal with getting shallow breaths until the folks at Charlie Med can take care of you.”
“Jimmy,” T. D. said, “you know that gunfire’s going to draw the rest of those NVA patrols, just like shit draws flies. We’ve got to get the hell out of Dodge right now. Me and Doc’s going to lift you to your feet, and we’re going to di di mao.”
Sanchez nodded his head and gritted his teeth as his college classmate and the platoon corpsman lifted him to his feet and draped his arms over their shoulders.
“Grab his shit,” McKay told Lance Corporal Sneed, who had already begun calling Ninth Marines combat command and operations center.
“Red Rider, Red Rider, Snake Charmer, flash-flash, shark bait, repeat, shark bait. Kilo-zero, whiskey-one, actual, med-evac lifeguard, Lima-Zulu-Oscar,” Sneed repeated again and again, but heard no response as he lugged his two backpacked radios and now the rifle and map case of his platoon commander, in addition to his own weapon and canteen belt. His coded message that he continued to repeat, with the key words, shark bait, alerted Ninth Marines operations and command center that the reconnaissance platoon had engaged the enemy, compromising their presence, and was now on the run to their primary rally point and its associated landing zone for emergency extraction. His additional information advised that the platoon had zero members killed, one man wounded, the commander, and that he suffered life-threatening wounds and needed immediate medical evacuation at Landing Zone Oscar.
“Only a couple of clicks past this little ridge, partner,” McKay told Sanchez as the wounded lieutenant tried to help the two Marines carrying him by kicking his legs, trying to run with them.
“Sir, don’t do that,” Doc Hamilton said, now breathing hard. “Your lungs are full of blood. You can’t get enough air to support yourself as it is. Relax, sir, let us carry you.”
Moonlight flashed through the tree branches overhead as the three Marines ran, carrying the fourth. Ahead of them a broad clearing loomed, more than three football fields wide, scattered with low bushes and palmettos in the waist-high grass.
“Go around! Go around! Danger area!” Sanchez gasped. “Too dangerous!”
“What do you think, Doc?” McKay asked the corpsman. Both men knew that time meant everything for Sanchez’s survival.
“We start moving in the open, with this moonlight, anyone can see us. No cover out there,” Hamilton said, catching his breath.
“Why not call the choppers into this place?” McKay then asked.
“Lots of times these places get pretty boggy, might not be a good LZ. The lieutenant saw it on his map but chose not to use it as a rally point or a landing site. I’m sure he had his reasons,” the corpsman said. “What do you think, Sneed?”
“I’ve jumped on a Huey in a rice paddy before. No big deal. Can’t be much worse,” the radioman said. “Problem is, I ain’t got any signal down here. Nothing we can call out on. Rally Point Tango has good reception, on that little hilltop, can’t be more than another kilometer or two, just over that next rise. If Red Rider heard any of my Maydays when I called them right after we got hit, they’ll have choppers and a reaction force inbound to us.”
“All our teams have already headed to Tango anyway,” Hamilton added. “They’ll be on the run to the rally point, radios off, after hearing the shooting.”
“Okay. You guys skirt the clearing. Stay under cover. I’ll take Lieutenant Sanchez and cut straight across,” Mckay then said, streams of sweat streaking the smeared camouflage paint on his face. “I think I can move faster with him across my shoulders than trying to do this three-legged foot race with him in the middle. Grit your teeth, Jimmy. You’re going for a ride.”
The stockily built McKay with his tree-trunk legs squatted under Sanchez, and bent the lieutenant across his shoulders. When he stood up, he gave Doc Hamilton and Lance Corporal Sneed a nod and then took off jogging.
>
“Try to keep me in sight, but don’t stop for anything,” Tommy McKay called out. “Run like hell. Meet me at Tango.”
Sweat poured off Tommy McKay’s body, soaking his clothes as he ran. He tried not to think of the North Vietnamese patrols now searching for them. He tried not to think of how easily the NVA could pick off him and his best friend in the broad moonlight as he dashed across the wide clearing. He tried not to think of the bogs and quicksand, the sinkholes and the booby traps that possibly lay in his path as he ran. He tried not to think of those things, but he did. He thought of them all. He ran ahead anyway. His best friend lay dying across his shoulders.
“Hang on, partner,” McKay said as he pumped his legs. “We’re coming to the other side. Easy as pie. Another touchdown at the Cotton Bowl.”
Just as he thought he had the clearing behind him, and could see the forest’s edge standing less than a hundred yards away, loud snaps and pops cracked through the air, and the ground suddenly burst with geyserlike plumes of dirt and debris all around him.
“Hang on, buddy. Hang on!” the former Texas Longhorn football star turned Marine lawyer and unauthorized grunt told his best friend as he reached into his heart and shifted his legs and his stamina to another, more powerful gear. Digging deep inside himself, far beyond any point he had ever before gone, at a depth that Tommy McKay had never known even existed within himself, he tapped into the root of the fire that had all of his life made him a champion: a source of strength that now released a whole new man within himself. This newfound energy sent his legs pumping harder and faster than he had ever before pushed them.
At the edge of the clearing where McKay had begun his dash for his best friend’s life, a full rifle platoon of North Vietnamese soldiers emerged. They had begun their pursuit at the onset of the shooting, and found the easily followed trail within minutes. Seeing the silhouette of the Marine running across the clearing with his comrade draped across his shoulders, the Communist troops began firing at the fleeing target. Like deer hunters with buck fever, they excitedly yanked and cranked rounds all around T. D. McKay and Jimmy Sanchez.
“O God, please help me,” McKay prayed as he ran. “I know Mama talks to You every day about me, and I don’t talk to You nearly enough, but please, dear Jesus, please be with me tonight. Keep their bullets wide, and keep my buddy alive. If You can just do that for us, I can do the rest.”
Tommy Touchdown McKay crossed the more than three hundred-yard-wide clearing, carrying his 165-pound best friend, in less than sixty seconds. Although they lost sight of him as he dashed into the forest, the North Vietnamese never stopped firing. Overhead and all around, bullets snapped through the branches, popped through the brush, and burst into the ground, but none hit T. D. McKay or Jimmy Sanchez.
“YOU REMEMBER HOW to load one of these things?” Terry O’Connor said breathlessly as he pushed the M60 machine gun into the fighting hole and then helped Elvis to crawl inside the shelter.
“I’m kind of busy,” Jon Kirkwood answered, firing his M14 at more than a dozen enemy soldiers who now ran toward the barbed-wire fence and coiled razor wire barrier that stood less than a hundred yards in front of him.
“Push down on that latch, there, sir,” Elvis said, pointing to a catch on the side of the machine gun. “This deal here pops up, then you just lay the belt with the first round right here, and then slam her down. Pull the charging handle and cut loose.”
“Watch out for hot brass, Jon,” Terry O’Connor grunted as he shoved the snout of the machine gun over the parapet and began chopping down small men dressed in sandals and black pajamas who now ran at the wire, throwing bags of short-fused explosives at the barrier.
One after another, the Viet Cong guerrillas ran their suicide charges, hurling their satchels at the fence, trying to blow open a breach through which the North Vietnamese soldiers attacking behind them could infiltrate the camp and destroy the stores of ammunition and fuel that the Americans kept here. As each wave of sappers broke across the open ground, Terry O’Connor chopped them down with the machine gun.
With their automatic weapon now speaking terms that the enemy could understand, Jon Kirkwood focused his M14’s work on uniformed soldiers who moved through the gaps in the trees, seeming to direct the charges and mortar barrage.
“Cut off the head, the snake dies,” the dark-haired lawyer spoke as he put round after round into the dodging shapes of what he regarded as North Vietnamese officers.
Elvis, with his one good eye, took aim with the M14 that Terry O’Connor had used until he got his hands on the M60. He picked targets that the machine gun had missed.
Overhead, the Seventh Marines’ eighty-one-millimeter mortar sections had rained high explosives and Willy Peter white phosphorus projectiles down the stacks of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong firing the mortars and rockets into the camp. The counterbattery rapidly took effect and soon silenced the enemy tubes, enabling the Marines who defended the line to focus their fire most effectively against the sappers and raiders.
Before Major Jack Hembee and a hundred Marine grunts could swarm the gap where the two lawyers and three enlisted Marines fought the overwhelming enemy force, the trio of men left standing had managed to turn back the tide.
“Evening, Major Danger,” Elvis said, smiling at Jack Hembee as the operations officer put his head inside the backdoor of the fighting hole.
All along the flank now, dozens of Marines from the reaction force that accompanied the major set up hasty firing positions and began shooting at the fleeing enemy. The mortars kept pushing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units farther out, and soon the Eleventh Marines artillery began launching their salvos at them.
“You’re no worse for wear here,” Hembee said in a relaxed voice. “How about Rat and Henry?”
“They’re over yonder, sir,” Elvis said, climbing out of the fighting hole and hustling toward the neighboring bunker where he had left his two buddies. “We took a sixty in the window. Blew shit out of everything. Rat got the bad end of it. Henry got it in both eyes. Sir, I gotta check on my two boys.”
“I’ll go with you,” Hembee said, and followed Elvis to the neighboring hole, where two Marines and a corpsman had already put a wrap around Henry’s eyes and had King Rat lying on the ground with his knees elevated.
Behind Major Danger and Elvis, Jon Kirkwood and Terry O’Connor joined them in a squat by the exploded fighting hole, watching King Rat and Henry getting first aid. Marines from the reaction force had moved them out of the supplementary position and had taken over the watch.
“What do we do now?” Kirkwood asked the major.
“I’ve got a busy night still,” Hembee said. “Be nice to catch these guys. So we’ll be working on that for a while, anyway. You two might hit the rack, though. Elvis needs a patch job, and I’m afraid my other two house mice are out of commission, but Goose can show you where to lay your heads.”
“Sir, you don’t mind we catch some sleep?” O’Connor said, half embarrassed, since the major had work left to do. “I don’t think Jon and I have shut our eyes more than four or five hours since we left California on Wednesday.”
Hembee laughed.
“I know how you feel,” the major said. “Seems that way to me, too, and I’ve been here ten months. You boys catch some Zs. We’ll get you up and fed before that chopper hits the deck mañana. Get you on your way to see your clients at Chu Lai.”
“Sure you don’t mind?” Kirkwood said, blinking his tired eyes.
“Not at all, I insist,” Hembee said, stuffing more tobacco in his jaw. “Care for a bedtime chew, Terry?”
“I’ll take a rain check on that, Major Danger,” O’Connor answered with a smile. Then he looked at the operations officer and the debris and havoc that surrounded him. “I think I figured out why they call you that.”
Hembee smiled. “Shit does seem to happen, doesn’t it.”
Elvis looked at the two lawyers with his one good eye while the corp
sman wrapped a battle dressing over the bad one. He cracked a wide smile, glancing up at the major, and nodded.
“JIMMY, YOU STILL with me, partner?” T. D. McKay said to the wounded lieutenant as he gently slid his best friend off his shoulders and laid him on the ground.
Sanchez raised his hand to let his buddy know he had held on to consciousness, but when he tried to talk he could only whisper. He felt as though a truck had parked on his chest. No matter how hard he pulled with his lungs, he could hardly get air inside them.
“Relax, buddy,” McKay said, propping Sanchez up with his back against a tree, trying to see if the upright position would ease his breathing. “We’re at the rally point. I don’t see anyone else, though.”
“Quit talking so loud,” a voice came from behind McKay, and he turned, surprised, to see Staff Sergeant Paul Rhodes, his black-framed glasses taped across their nose bridge. “That Lieutenant Sanchez you got there, wounded?”
“Yeah. He took three hits in the back. I think they got his lungs. He can’t breathe very well,” McKay spoke in quiet breaths. “We thought it was the Viper team coming back to us. Caught Jimmy off guard. We took down all but two of the enemy patrol, though. Those guys may be dead or wounded, too. I unloaded a magazine right at them, not twenty feet away. The damned NVA wore flop hats a lot like ours. Silhouettes in the dark. How could we tell?”
“Shit happens when you go slack. Nobody else hit?” Rhodes whispered.
“Not in our group,” McKay answered. “You just get here?”
“Just ahead of you,” Rhodes spoke in a voice no louder than his breathing. “We heard you breaking timber after that gunplay, sounded like an elephant stampede, so we took cover. Mamba team got here first. Sergeant McCoy set them out as security with my guys. Eight of us, and you make nine. Rattler, Bushmaster, and Viper haven’t shown their faces yet. Where’s Doc and Baby Huey?”
“Baby Huey?” McKay asked.
“Sneed, the radio guy,” Rhodes said.
“He and Doc skirted around that big clearing back about a mile,” McKay said in short breaths. “I had hoped choppers would already be inbound, so I cut across.”
Jungle Rules Page 14