by Dennis Foley
The jeep bounced along poorly graded and crowned roads that were flanked by drainage ditches and telephone poles that carried miles and miles of phone and power lines to all the buildings, huts, hooches, and shacks that had been built since the war started.
Trying to distinguish what was what, Hollister marveled at the extent to which the area had been organized, sandbagged, painted, roofed, screened, and marked with an array of signs and directional arrows that would confuse even a genius.
Troops of all sizes, colors, and functions crisscrossed in front of the jeep. He had never seen such a hub of activity, both business and personal. Trucks, trailers, tractors, graders, front loaders, choppers, generators, pumps, air conditioners, and fans of all sizes filled the air with a frenzy of noises that would forever change the once quiet and simple rice-paddy farmland. Hollister had expected the Field Force Headquarters to be busy and well appointed, but finding Bien Hoa like this was a real surprise.
“This is your rear area, sir,” the driver said, turning off the main road.
Hollister looked up ahead and was confronted with a complete, life-sized copy of one of the thirty-four-foot parachute jump towers used at the Airborne schools in the States. It was the one he had seen earlier when he landed.
At the tower’s base stood several tropical huts with blackout doors over windows that were open to allow cross-ventilation. The roofs were all ripple aluminum, and each had screened-in uppers and steps in front of all the doorways. Commo wire was strung from the eaves of each building to a central building that looked very much to Hollister as if it might be an orderly room or commo shack.
The driver pulled into a circular gravel drive and halted the jeep in front of the building that Hollister had spotted as the company headquarters. He stepped out of the jeep and reached into the back for his B-4 bag. The driver had also stepped out to help Hollister, but quickly realized that he would carry his own bags. “Well, good luck, sir.”
“You remember our deal now”—Hollister looked at the soldier’s name tape above his pocket—“Cathcart?”
“Yessir, I will,” Cathcart said, then saluted smartly.
He thought it strange that there was virtually no activity at all in the LRP compound. A few vehicles stood in what looked to him to be a makeshift motor pool, and a pair of chubby puppies played at biting each other’s tails on the opposite side of what served as a company street.
He knew he wouldn’t find out anything standing outside the orderly room, so he moved his bag out of the roadway and leaned it up against the poured cement steps leading to the doorway. He noticed that the corner of the steps had a soldier’s version of a cornerstone, the date scratched into the wet concrete: 23/5/65.
He knew the compound was not new enough to have been built for the new LRP company, and it was certainly too well appointed to have ever held infantrymen. As he reached for the door, he was able to read the unit designation that had been originally painted on the doorway, but recently painted over, unsatisfactorily. It had been the headquarters of an engineer battalion. Hollister smiled. That explained the quality construction and the lavish appointments—by infantry standards.
There was no one inside the orderly room. A Japanese fan whirred in a whisper and rotated on its base, painting the room with invisible warmth. The room itself looked awful. Files stood on the floor as there were no cabinets to put them in, trash was stacked in ammo boxes, and the only lighting came from the screened windows. Rickety desks were topped with aging Remington manuals, and there was not a chair in the room.
Suddenly, footsteps slammed up the wooden steps on the far side of the building and the screen door swung wide. A small soldier with a box of toilet paper in his arms burst through and hollered, “Lookee here what I just got!”
He peered over the top of the large box and came face-to-face with Hollister, just short of plowing him down in his rush. “Oh, shit! I’m sorry, sir. I thought Sergeant Dewey was here.”
“He must be in real trouble if he needs that much toilet paper,” Hollister said jokingly, trying to relieve the soldier of his awkwardness.
The soldier thought a minute, then got it. “Oh, yessir—I mean, no, sir. He doesn’t need it. We all need it. We haven’t any real ass-wipe in almost a week. We been stealin’ extra copies of the Stars and Stripes from the Message Center over at Long Binh and using anything else we can find.”
“Well, good. What’s your name, and who and where is Sergeant Dewey?”
“Coots, sir. PFC Leonard Coots, and Sergeant Dewey is the company clerk. And I don’t know where he is.”
“Tell you what, Coots, my name is Hollister, and I’m reporting in. Since there’s no one here, why don’t you stay here—answer the phones and such—and I’ll go try to round someone up?”
“That’s all right with me, sir. But I don’t think you’ll find much of anybody if you don’t find Sergeant Dewey.”
Outside the Orderly Room the company area was still void of signs of soldiers, except for the two pairs of fatigue trousers that Hollister could see sticking out from under a three-quarter-ton truck in what appeared to the motor pool’s maintenance area. He was sure that whatever their skills were, getting him signed in and on the Morning Report were not their responsibilities.
Deciding to look somewhere else, he wandered toward an unmarked building that seemed to have some noises coming from it—scraping sounds.
Inside, Hollister found three soldiers dragging a field range across the concrete floor to what appeared to be a loading-dock arrangement on the back side of the building. It was the mess hall, and the large T-shirted man supervising the positioning of the field stove turned to see who had entered.
The man turned out to be an old friend of Hollister’s, Mess Sergeant Kendrick. Kendrick beamed. “Well, I’ll be damned! If it ain’t—”
“It is,” Hollister said. He smiled and reached out his hand to take Kendrick’s. “How you doing? I thought you’d be out of the army and running your own gourmet restaurant back in New Orleans by now.”
Kendrick laughed at the thought. “Oh, no, sir. I can’t be cookin’ in no fancy restaurant. I can’t find a place in N’Orleans that needs a guy who can only cook gumbo for five hundred at a sitting.”
“Good to see you. You the head spoon here?”
“Yessir, and a fine job it is—or will be as soon as I kick a few asses and get it organized. I was in a headquarters mess over at the one hundred ninety-ninth Brigade and heard they were puttin’ up a new LRP company—and you know me, sir.”
As always, Kendrick had drawn his jump wings and his rank on his paper cook’s hat. Hollister took note of the change since he had last seen Kendrick as a cook in his old LRP detachment on his first tour. “You made seven?”
“Yessir, this war must be gettin’ to ’em. They be promotin’ jus’ about anyone nowadays.” He then noticed the captain’s bars on Hollister’s collar. “Oh, ah, sir—I didn’t mean—”
Hollister smiled at his old friend. “Forget it. I think you were right, anyhow.”
“So you’re here with us—like back in the Airborne Brigade?”
“I hear that I am, although I can’t seem to find anyone to log me in for duty.”
“Oh, sir, there’s nobody much here. This is our rear, and the company’s forward workin’ out of Cu Chi—trying to get some training done. I only came back to pick up some stuff that I need. The Ol’ Man, the first sergeant and everybody be up at Cu Chi.”
The flight to Cu Chi was at a low-enough altitude to get a feel for the terrain. Though he was wedged between the field range and some mailbags, Hollister worked his way to the chopper’s open door to take in as much as he could.
The ground below was as flat as his home in eastern Kansas, but unlike the fields of grain, soybeans, and millet, there were geometric squares, rectangles, and pie-shaped paddies and garden plots that used every square hectare of the precious soil to grow whatever would thrive in the rich delta of the sprawling Mekong
River and the two other major rivers north and west of Saigon-Bien Hoa.
As he looked down, he was surprised to find that almost every square mile was teeming with villagers, children, livestock, and military vehicles. There was no unfilled soil and no uncontested, undefended land as far as he could see. As soon as he saw it, he knew that tactics as he remembered them from his first tour in the Highlands would not work well there.
Cu Chi was the base camp for the 25th Infantry Division. Over the course of two years in Vietnam, the division had gained and lost units through what the army called “task organizing.” It had also been the landlord for units not under its control, which were given space at the huge base camp and afforded the protection that the division’s perimeter could afford.
Tenant units were always a point of friction for divisions. They tended to take advantage of what the division had to offer, giving little back. The troops assigned to the division were always convinced that tenant units were “getting over,” dodging guard duty and some of the other more unpleasant duties.
Juliet Company had been given a half-dozen broken-down tropical huts on the eastern side of the base. The area had belonged to a unit once assigned to the 25th and then later reassigned to some other part of Vietnam. The type of unit and its actual function was not apparent by looking at the abandoned barracks, mess hall, supply room, and chopper pad. Over time the area had taken on the name of the large Indian head with full warbonnet that had been painted on the concrete chopper pad: OLD WARRIOR.
As the chopper settled onto the pad, Hollister was only able to catch part of the cracked and weathered insignia that had once been painted in bold primary colors. He thought it was a good sign that as he stepped out his foot first touched the word WARRIOR.
As the blades spun down, a frenzy of activities took place. Soldiers, some obviously LRPs and some probably not, came to pull supplies from the chopper. The crew members went through their shutdown checklists, and Sergeant Kendrick shepherded the movement of his field range to a low, flat-roofed building several dozen meters away.
“Where’s the CP?” Hollister yelled over the turbine whine.
One of the soldiers turned to point at a building on the far side of the chopper. “That’s it over there, Cap’n.”
Looking back through the chopper’s cargo compartment, Hollister could see that the building was clearly different from the others in that it was L-shaped, had a fresh set of protective sandbags around it, and four guy wires held a tall, spiked 292 antenna head well above the roof. Anyone could tell that it was a CP of some type.
Chapter 7
INSIDE THE CP HOLLISTER found the company headquarters and the operations functions in separate ends of the L. There was no indication as to what the building had originally been designed for, but the waist-high counter that served as a dividing line between the two legs of the L told Hollister that it might have been a supply room of some type. If there had ever been any shelves or bins to hold the equipment, they were long gone.
No one noticed Hollister’s entrance. He put his bag down and scanned the room. He stood behind the two radio operators and two NCOs who were bent over the makeshift bench that held radios and a scattering of paperwork, clipboards, and coffee cups.
Above the radio bench a status board covered with a cracked piece of acetate had the numbers of deployed teams scrawled by what appeared to have been a crumbling grease pencil. The word “schedule” had been misspelled. It was obvious from the radio cross talk and the preoccupation of the RTOs and NCOs that something critical was going on in the field.
One of the RTOs turning to reach for a trash can where he could dump a half C ration can filled with cigarette butts, noticed Hollister. “Oh, sir …,” he said, starting to stand, not sure if Hollister would expect him to.
Raising his hand so the soldier would not stop what he was doing, Hollister shook his head. “Please, carry on. We can all say hello later.”
The others, equally busy with radios and a field phone, took a second to look back at Hollister to size him up. They nodded and gestured acknowledgment and a hint of appreciation that he didn’t seem to want everything to stop just because an officer had entered.
The radios crackled with cross talk. Hollister decided to find a spot in the back of the room and watch. The two radio operators hunched over the long bench and spoke rapidly to unseen operators on the other ends of their pork-chop mikes.
The Operations sergeant, SFC Kurzikowski, an old Airborne soldier who had seen service in Korea, paced between the two, occasionally turning to Hollister to explain who owned what voice and where they were on the map or in the sky.
A team was being extracted because it had been compromised by a group of children who had walked right into their ambush position about a thousand meters from their village. There was no shooting, but every insert and every extraction was fraught with danger for the LRP teams, the chopper pilots, and the crews. Hollister knew that just about anything could happen, and even the most simple move could get people dead. His heart started pumping enough for him to realize he was back. It was real to him. It was almost as if he had never left Vietnam.
“Coming out,” said one of the pilots over the radio set on the chopper frequency. His voice came from the small OD speaker tied up against the wall behind the radio bench.
“We’re up,” came over the FM radio that the company commander and the team were on.
Hollister immediately liked the cross-communication checking that the Operations personnel could do by having a radio on every frequency being used to conduct the operations. There was even a radio on the air force forward air controller’s frequency and another on the artillery fire direction center’s frequency.
It gave Hollister confidence that when things were happening someone would be able to pick it up if there was a lack of communication or a miscue on the part of the supporting units. He smiled to himself. He had never had the luxury of so many radios in his old LRP detachment. It was a good sign.
Kurzikowski looked at his watch, made some mental calculations, and looked at Hollister. “Sir, they’ll be out on the pad in sixteen mikes.”
Hollister nodded. He liked the fact that the operations setup was precise enough to know exactly how long it would take the ships to return to the FOB. He liked the no-nonsense performance of the leathery sergeant who was taking a White Owl out of its cellophane wrap and wetting the end in his mouth before lighting it.
Somehow Hollister had expected Major Sangean to look different from the small man who stepped out of the Command and Control helicopter.
Yelling over the chopper noise, Hollister saluted. “Sir, my name is Hollister. I was told to report—”
Sangean returned the salute and pointed toward the far end of the CP. “Meet me in there in zero five.” He didn’t give Hollister a chance to respond. He simply broke into a trot and headed for the Operations end of the building.
Hollister stood when Sangean entered from the Operations section. He waved Hollister back to his seat on the edge of a footlocker. “Gimme a sec,” he said as he took his pen out of his jungle fatigue pocket and jotted something down in the green army notebook that came out of the other pocket.
While he made notes, Hollister took a second look at his new commander. He was so typical of all the Special Forces officers he had met in his six years in the army. Though his frame was small, he was wiry, almost stringy. The tendons in his face and neck were taut, and they flexed as he thought about what he was writing. He wore a West Point ring on his right hand and a GMT-Master Rolex watch on his left wrist. His eyes were shielded by GI-issue aviator sunglasses, and the skin in front of and below his ears was marked with the impression of a headset that he must have been wearing for hours in the chopper. His uniform was the new camouflage pattern that had come into the inventory for special units since Hollister had last been in-country.
On Sangean’s chest were his Combat Infantryman’s Badge and Master Parachutist wings. He
also wore the hard-hat helmet insignia of a school-trained diver. Below his pocket flap he wore the Jungle Expert patch.
Over his right pocket was sewn subdued cloth Vietnamese jump wings. His right shoulder bore the Special Forces combat patch, and on his left Hollister saw the distinctive tab that he would wear with Juliet Company. It was a simple arc of black on OD that read LONG RANGE PATROL. Sangean wore it beneath his Ranger tab and over the Airborne tab that topped his arrow-shaped IIFFV patch.
The field phone rattled, and Sangean picked it up, answering with only his last name. As the major listened to the caller, occasionally speaking in clipped one-word responses, Hollister noticed outside the window the LRPs who had come in on the second chopper with Sangean. They were different from the fresh-faced young soldiers whom Hollister had been with on his first tour. They weren’t as playful, they seemed older than he expected, and they looked as if they were unhappy about something. None of the usual banter was going on as they crossed from what Hollister assumed was a debriefing shack to their billets.
“They’re pissed off,” Sangean said, interrupting Hollister’s thoughts.
“What about, sir?”
“This fucking AO’s useless. They’re compromised from the moment they step out of a chopper out there.”
“Sir?”
“There isn’t enough vegetation in all of western III Corps to hide a LRP team. So anytime we insert a team there’s a good chance that someone, somewhere out there, spotted them.”
Hollister remembered the terrain he had seen on the east side of Cu Chi on the way out. He had to assume that it must have been the same out in the AO—to the west, toward Cambodia.
“It’s nothing like what you’re used to. The Highlands were a tough hump, but the concealment was your best tool. You could go anywhere up there and not be seen. I was up there with an A Team. I know what you are getting ready to find out. This place wasn’t made for LRPs.
“Down here there are VC sympathizers in the damn base camp and out in the AO pointing their fingers toward our teams. I can’t believe we haven’t lost a team yet in the two weeks we have been shaking out the kinks.”