Jungle Rules

by Charles W. Henderson

  “Don’t make me have to be getting on that frog and then find myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting on any of you heroes to get aboard. You had better be there ahead of me. That’s all I’ve got to say about that,” Rhodes added gruffly.

  As the team leaders departed the briefing circle, the staff sergeant took aside Lionel McCoy and Bobby Sneed.

  “Get the lieutenant and as many of the boys as you can on the first frog out of here,” Rhodes said, “It’s going to get ugly.”

  Then he looked at Lieutenant McKay for approval as he continued to speak: “You and Baby Huey hang back, make sure everybody else is aboard, and then get on the last bird. I want the radioman next to you so you can keep on top of communications with us, and with Red Rider. You’re the relay.

  “Both the lieutenant and I will have walkie-talkies, along with Corporal Sanders, who’s got his own, and one of his boys who took Bushmaster’s radio, call them Viper One and Viper Two.

  “Make sure that the security team from those choppers and the pilots all know we are out there. We’re going to come barreling into the LZ with guns ablazing, our hair on fire, and lots of company jumping up our asses. No doubt you’ll hear us shooting long before you see us. Don’t let that spook anybody. Make sure the security teams know we’ll be coming in shooting, but the other way. I don’t want to be dodging their bullets along with the NVA’s, too.

  “Try to hold the chopper on the ground until we get there, but don’t get yourselves overrun. Charlie hits the circle first, you’re going to boogie. Got that?

  “We’ll do our damnedest to get aboard. I sure as shit don’t want to walk home. We may be dragging wounded or dead, too. I damned sure ain’t leaving anybody, either. Just do the best you can for us. Got it?”

  Tommy McKay nodded his approval, and Sergeant McCoy gave Staff Sergeant Rhodes a hug.

  “We ain’t leaving you,” McCoy said, and looked at both the staff sergeant and the lieutenant without any expression on his gaunt, dark face.

  While the two sergeants spoke, Tommy McKay had studied the platoon commander’s sectional chart of the patrol area that he took from Jimmy Sanchez’s map pouch.

  “What about artillery?” McKay asked, looking at Rhodes and McCoy.

  “What about it?” the staff sergeant responded.

  “Lieutenant Sanchez has several on-call targets marked here on his map, including this rally point,” McKay said.

  “Security will probably have a few sixty-mike-mike mortars, but I don’t want to sit between them and Charlie if they decide to lob a few. Furthermore, I’d rather have my ass someplace else besides here if you decided to launch a major fire mission into this rally point,” Rhodes said. “We get a bunch of enemy congregated here, though, and then call it as a target, we get in desperate straits, it might buy us the time we need to get into the LZ and aboard the choppers. The pilots sure as hell won’t like the idea of inbound artillery, though.”

  “Coming from where?” McKay asked.

  “Twelfth Marine Regiment has units scattered all along Highway Nine. Plus, they’re augmented by a whole shitload of army batteries, from outfits like the Fortieth, Forty-fourth, the Ninety-fourth, Twenty-ninth and the Sixty-fifth artillery regiments, just to name a few off the top of my head. Damned bunch of army artillery up here,” Rhodes said. “Pretty much any direction you want except north of us. That’s Charlie on the other side of the DMZ with his long-range one-thirties and one-fifty-twos. We’ve got friendly artillery at the Rock Pile, southwest of us, but those guns will interfere with the choppers’ flight pattern. Besides, a short round could take out the LZ. Camp Carroll’s due south of us, but the same story with the helicopters as the Rock Pile. Only thing we can get outside our flight pattern that might keep the LZ out of play would have to come from the batteries based to the east of us at Con Thien.”

  “So we have an artillery option if we can use it?” McKay asked, folding the map and putting it back in the pouch.

  “Correct, sir,” Rhodes answered. Then he took the lieutenant by the arm and said, “Last resort, though. Think about this: It took us eight hours to hump that distance, and we move fast, so those guns aren’t exactly next door. The farther out from the fire base, the greater the room for error. Half a minute of angle off at their end could drop a round on us. You call Tango as your target, then LZ Oscar could catch an errant round if someone doesn’t line up the numbers exactly square. Inside a five-hundred-meter circle, I’d say, which includes the north tree line at the landing zone, is danger-close.”

  “But it is an option,” McKay said.

  “Yes, sir, it is. And don’t be afraid to use it, if we need it,” Rhodes said. “We’ll definitely call in a pattern on Tango and Oscar when we depart the area.”

  “Sergeant McCoy,” McKay said, now looking at the second senior NCO, “you got it? On my signal, on-call target echo-zulu-six.”

  “Yes, sir, on your signal,” McCoy said.

  “Launch a Willy Peter spotter round first,” McKay added. “I’ll give you adjustments if needed. Once the round hits the pocket, I’ll give you a fire-for-effect order. Have them lay a spread two hundred yards right and left of target center. By the time it hits, I plan to be running across the LZ.”

  McCoy smiled and nodded approvingly.

  “Sir, excuse me,” Lance Corporal Sneed said, taking McKay by the arm. “Your call sign. In command and signal, you didn’t tell us your call sign. Something easy, we can remember.”

  T. D. McKay thought for a moment. Football terms flashed through his mind, but then he considered that most of the reconnaissance Marines knew him only as that lawyer from Da Nang. He looked at Sneed and smiled.

  “How about, ‘Law Dog’?” McKay said.

  STEALTHILY MANEUVERING THE five hundred meters south from Rally Point Tango to the landing zone in less than twenty minutes, seventeen of the twenty-four men on the reconnaissance patrol now lay hidden with their unconscious and barely breathing platoon commander. They disbursed among the trees along the far southern edge of the meadow designated on their maps as LZ Oscar. Already the sounds of whirling chopper wings beating through the still night air began to echo across the moonlit hills around the rally point and the nearby landing zone.

  Hugging the terrain, three Marine Corps CH-46D Sea Knight helicopters dispatched from Con Thien with a thirty-six-man security force, split on the first and last birds, closed on LZ Oscar. The sounds of the inbound choppers’ engines singing as their twin-rotor blades thumped through the air immediately captured the attention of the two now reinforced platoons of North Vietnamese soldiers. The noise drew them due south, at a full-out run from their cross-hatched search for the briefly encountered enemy north of Tango, and sent them to intercept the trio of aircrafts as they landed.

  As the point of the enemy force broke through the north-side tree line at Rally Point Tango, several of the men tripping over the three dead scouts, Tommy McKay opened fire with his carbine from the south side of the clearing. Staff Sergeant Paul Rhodes and Corporal Lynn Sanders and his three Viper cohorts sent lead flying, too, as the first wave of NVA emerged into the open. Under the sudden hail of bullets, the enemy soldiers immediately fell behind cover where their three dead scouts lay, and returned the volley.

  McKay had paired his men into three elements. He and Rhodes lay in the first position, centered, employing a frontal enfilade against the NVA, while Sanders and his three Marines made up the second and third units. The Viper team leader and his partner engaged the enemy in a left oblique class of fire as his other two Vipers took up a right oblique position. With the NVA now halted in a fight, each two-man section began to fall back fifty yards a jump, one pair at a time, while the other two teams provided covering fire for the displacing third, leapfrogging backward.

  As they moved rearward, and their shooting became somewhat obscured by the forest, the North Vietnamese platoons began to advance forward, flowing around Tango’s small clearing, also using fire-and-movement tactics
.

  “Law Dog, Law Dog, Snake Charmer, choppers on the ground, security team out,” Baby Huey reported on his radio.

  “Law Dog, copy,” McKay said, fumbling with the bricklike handheld device and then stuffing it back inside the front of his blouse when he finished his response.

  “Just reach in your shirt and key the talk button twice! You don’t have to take it out and say anything!” Staff Sergeant Rhodes shouted to McKay while continuing to lay grazing cover fire for Sanders and his men as they moved, and seeing the lieutenant juggling the radio. “Sneed will hear it and know you copy.”

  McKay gave the staff sergeant a thumbs-up sign and then sprang to his feet and ran fifty yards rearward as Sanders and his men now provided the cover.

  In the distance, three hundred yards in front of him, the forest seemed to come alive with the silhouettes of running men, dashing from cover to cover, firing as they ran. Muzzle flashes among the dark shadows of the undergrowth surrounding Rally Point Tango sparkled like sequins on black velvet. McKay quickly realized that many more than fifty North Vietnamese soldiers now pursued them.

  “Fire mission!” McKay screamed in the handheld radio. “One Willy Peter, on-call target, echo-zulu-six.”

  “Roger, Law Dog,” McCoy responded, “fire mission, one Willy Peter, on-call target, echo-zulu-six.”

  As McCoy repeated back the instructions, Lance Corporal Sneed relayed the fire mission to Red Rider, who had the Twelfth Marines fire-control liaison at his side. In seconds, the single shot launched out of the muzzle of a 175-millimeter howitzer.

  For Tommy McKay, the minute it took for the fire mission to return with delivery seemed like a lifetime. Then from his right he heard the unmistakable oscillating rumble of the artillery projectile traveling inbound, sounding to him like an old diesel truck gearing down at the top of a steep grade.

  Suddenly, like a blinding, bright fountain of fire, the white phosphorus sprang from the thundering impact, dead center in the rally point’s clearing.

  “Fire for effect!” McKay shouted as he kept firing his rifle at the swarms of Communist soldiers diving for cover.

  As he issued the order, McCoy and Baby Huey responded and relayed to Red Rider. In a few seconds, the 175-millimeter howitzer battery came alive with their opening salvo of half a dozen high-velocity explosive rounds launching toward Rally Point Tango.

  “Everybody run!” McKay then screamed over his radio, his voice so loud that all five of the reconnaissance Marines heard him clearly without needing their walkie-talkies.

  This time, as the six Marines ran the last two hundred yards, shooting as they fled, the time from the fire mission’s call to the first wave of impacts seemed nearly instantaneous. Behind them the world came alight with the flashes of the exploding artillery projectiles, and rumbled as the earth shook under their feet. Hot air and smoke washed over the fleeing Americans like a sudden desert wind, and it seemed to the half-dozen warriors as they ran that the incoming rounds impacted at their heels.

  Before the second salvo had reached the target area, the exhilarated Marines dashed from the tree line into the open meadow of the landing zone, where one twin-rotor Sea Knight helicopter sat with its blades spinning, bouncing on its wheels. On its down-tilted rear ramp, a Marine in a bush hat stood next to another in a white aviator helmet, both men waving at these last six to hurry aboard.

  SWEAT DRENCHED T. D. McKay as he fell in the red nylon webbing of the passenger bench that hung along the wall of the shuddering helicopter as it flew south and then banked to the east. The lawyer looked out the ramp and saw Landing Zone Oscar now come alight with incoming artillery. Then he stood up and looked along the seating made of crisscrossed straps tied to tubular aluminum rails. He counted eight Marines who wore steel helmets, and seven Marines wearing bush hats, one with a backpack radio piled at his feet. He looked for Sergeant McCoy and sat next to him.

  “You got them on the first chopper out, right?” McKay asked the sergeant.

  “Everybody got out of the zone, sir,” McCoy said, and then looked down at the metal floor under his feet.

  Tommy McKay truly felt alive. In his chest he felt a rush similar to the one he last recalled feeling as he had run a touchdown in the Cotton Bowl. The exhilaration did feel good.

  “Lieutenant Sanchez,” McKay then asked. “Doc got him aboard that first chopper okay?”

  Lionel McCoy kept looking at the floor between his toes.

  “Sergeant, what about the lieutenant?” McKay demanded. His heart suddenly pounded, not from exhilaration, but from panic.

  “Sir, he died in the LZ,” McCoy finally said, his lips quivering and his eyes filling with tears.

  Chapter 6

  “AIN’T ANY QUEER INDIANS”

  JON KIRKWOOD AND Terry O’Connor looked at the handwritten letters that Major Jack Hembee had given them as they climbed aboard the Huey helicopter that now flew the pair of wayward lawyers to Chu Lai on Sunday morning. True to his word, the operations officer had awakened the duo early, fed them a breakfast of scrambled eggs from a can, and had put the two misplaced Marines on the day’s first chopper out of LZ Ross. Both of the lawyers wore the green plastic headsets clamped over their ears, and the M14 rifles from their first Huey ride held between their knees as they sat on the gray nylon bench seat that ran across the aircraft’s rear bulkhead.

  In the letters, Major Danger had certified as witness that both officers had sustained combat with the enemy and had exchanged fire, thus warranting them the highly esteemed Marine Corps Combat Action Ribbon. Hembee had added in the letters that each of the two captains had displayed great courage under fire, demonstrated undaunted leadership, and had made a significant contribution toward repelling a determined enemy.

  “I’m going to mention you both in my dispatches,” Jack Hembee had told them as he shook each of their hands and slapped them across their backs. Neither of the pair had any idea of what the operations officer had

  meant by his parting words, mentioning them in his dispatches. O’Connor had suggested to Kirkwood that it had a classical, old-style military ring and that he felt honored by the comment.

  “That can be a double-edged sword,” Kirkwood said as the two lawyers walked from the flight line at Chu Lai, now searching for a ride or directions to military police headquarters and the holding facility, nicknamed the Chu Lai Cage, where their clients waited for them.

  “Jon, if someone handed you a sack full of candy you’d complain about tooth decay,” O’Connor responded, walking alongside his friend, both carrying the M14 rifles in one hand and the green plastic headsets in the other, making their way toward a group of buildings in front of which flew the American flag.

  “I’m not complaining,” Kirkwood said defensively, walking inside the headquarters with O’Connor. “I’m just saying we might do better if all of what happened yesterday and last night didn’t get mentioned in dispatches. I would rather that Major Dickinson heard nothing of it. That’s all.”

  “That asshole has you intimidated!” Terry O’Connor said, walking down the passageway toward a desk in the hallway where a burrheaded gunnery sergeant sat behind an open logbook.

  “I’m not intimidated,” Kirkwood huffed.

  “Dicky Doo has you by the balls, admit it,” O’Connor said, and then looked at the gunny. “We’re lawyers from Da Nang looking for our clients that you have boxed up around here somewhere.”

  “That would be at PMO,” the gunny said. “I can call over there and have them send someone here to pick you up.”

  “Would you do that for us?” O’Connor said, smiling.

  “What’s going on out there?” a voice boomed from an office behind the gunny’s desk. In a moment a barrel-chested, cigar-chomping colonel wearing a flight suit stepped through the doorway and gave the two captains a quick up-and-down look.

  “Sir,” the gunny said, “these are lawyers for a couple of turds we’ve got locked up. I’m calling PMO to give them a ride.”


  “You boys look like you’ve been shot at and missed, and then shit at and hit,” the colonel said in a loud, rasping voice, while clenching the stogie in his teeth and laughing. Then he glanced down at the gunny. “Go ahead and give the desk sergeant a call, and tell him I said to get his ass over here and pick up these two officers.”

  “Thanks, Colonel,” Kirkwood and O’Connor said simultaneously.

  “Care to come rest your butts in my office?” the commander of Marine Wing Support Group Seventeen said, sweeping his hand back in a gracious gesture for the pair of captains to come inside and sit. “I’m Jerry Sigenthaler, one of the stud ducks in this pond.”

  “Jon Kirkwood, sir, and this is my colleague Terry O’Connor,” Kirkwood said, stepping through the doorway and following the senior officer, who then flopped on a brown leather couch and threw his feet across a stack of magazines piled on a coffee table.

  “You boys ride down in the wheel wells, or did you get totally fucked up like that on purpose?” the colonel said and laughed.

  “We spent the night at LZ Ross,” O’Connor offered.

  The colonel roared laughing, nearly choking, and then took a sip from a mug of coffee to clear his throat.

  “Well, that explains it,” Sigenthaler said, and pointed at two brown leather chairs where the captains then sat. “Hell of a fight down there last night I hear. I guess it would have anyone’s knob looking a little bit frayed.”

  On the colonel’s desk sat a monstrous, ornately carved wooden name-plate. Adorning its left side, pinned to a red patch of felt, a colonel’s silver eagle rank insignia gleamed. On the right side of the gaudy, ornamental placard, a silver and gold Marine Corps officer’s emblem sparkled. Decoratively cut into the Filipino monkey wood in two-inch-high English script the words Jerome W. Sigenthaler stood in a sweeping arch.