by Dennis Foley
It was well after midnight when Hollister sat on the edge of his bunk. Vance was still in the CP trying to do some damage control. The loss of the first sergeant threw the brakes on several projects Vance was working on, and only more long hours would fix that.
Hollister thought about going over to help, but knew that as tired as he was, he would probably not be of any use. He looked at his watch and worried that he had to be up in just three hours to put in two teams before first light.
After an hour of trying to get to sleep, Hollister got up and turned on the light. The harder he tried to sleep, the more noise he heard in his head. He walked to the shelf that had once served as a perch for some supplies and grabbed the bottle of Scotch that stood at the ready.
He poured himself a few ounces of liquid sleeping pill and swallowed it with one gulp. The Scotch burned his throat, and he felt flush immediately. He wiped out the inside of his canteen cup with the corner of a damp OD towel. Wiping out the cup was a sign to himself that he did not intend to have another.
Hollister’s first two inserts went well. He still felt uncomfortable with the darkness and flatness of the western III Corps area. He had learned that it took some real concentration to make sure the spot for the landing zone was the right one. It helped that he cross-checked his call with the pilots and the FAC, who had a better and more vertical picture of the ground. Hollister would have to become much more aware of and reliant on the rivers and streams running through the AO. Straight lines, larger dikes, and roadways were not as distinctive as the shapes of the rivers and were more likely to mislead him in his map reading. He missed the terrain features that were so obvious in northern South Vietnam.
That afternoon went like the first, and Hollister was beginning to see the operational complexities compound themselves. In two days the choppers had been in and out of the AO twelve times to insert teams and conduct recons for future teams. Already there was some problem with a radio in one chopper. Another one had developed a vibration that needed inspection and attention.
The four ground teams were having trouble with the necessity to lay up during the day and move only at night. Each team felt that the longer it stayed put, the greater the likelihood it would be discovered by any number of enemy, friendly, or in-between Vietnamese wandering around the AO.
But the biggest problem was keeping the airspace clear of uninvolved aircraft. The full force of the American and allied contingent in South Vietnam could be a threat to the safety and security of the ground teams.
The first aircraft that flew over a team only partially concealed from above and reported the presence of an unknown element caused three choppers to appear from nowhere. Sergeant Decker, the team leader of 4-4, spent several anxious minutes trying to convince a flight of navy gunships that they were friendlies and begged them please not to circle their position and give them away.
The flap generated several phone calls between Sangean and Fowler. All of them were angry, and none of them satisfied Sangean’s demands that the area be closed off for LRP aircraft only. Fowler suggested that if the LRP team could be seen from the air, it was a training and camouflage discipline problem that was Sangean’s to fix.
From the look on Sangean’s face, the day was not going to be a pleasant one. But by late afternoon, things were quiet in the AO and Hollister’s energy level was dropping from his lack of sleep and the demands on him.
Mail call came, and he felt guilty getting a letter from Susan. He was a couple of days behind in his writing, but not in his promises to get some letters written. Every time he had tried to write a letter, however, he had been interrupted with some little detail. It was becoming painfully obvious that the business of running a LRP company was many times more complex than being a platoon leader in a small LRP detachment.
Susan was already beginning to ask questions about their future—immediate and long-term. The immediate questions were about R&R. Before he left, Hollister had told her he thought that unless policy had changed they might be able to meet.
The long-term questions were general. What did he think about doing after Vietnam? She didn’t ask directly, but it was clear she wanted to know what she had been asking him since they met: Was he going to stay in the army or not?
He put the letter down and lit a cigarette. The question had been nagging him as much as it had been chewing on her. When he first joined the army, there was no doubt that he was going to get out as soon as he could. But when it came time to get out, OCS seemed to be an option worth delaying his ETS for. Then the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution changed his plans. Instead of being able to get out after six months as a lieutenant, he was notified he would be on indefinite status until Vietnam was over. Since that day he had done well and made first lieutenant and captain. He knew if he could get some college in, there was a good chance he could make major in the next few years.
So getting out meant giving up a lot of professional accomplishments and starting over at whatever he went into. He knew what she knew. That was that each day he stayed in the army made it that much harder to get out and start over again.
He picked up the letter and wondered what he was going to say to Susan when he wrote back. At least he could offer some hope about R&R, if not any about getting out. He told himself to remember to get the latest on the R&R policy. The thought made him remember that they didn’t have a first sergeant anymore.
He put down the letter and picked up the field phone. He cranked and got Coots in the CP. “Hey, Hollister here. Patch me through to Sergeant Major Carey at Two Field, will you?”
“You gonna be in Operations? It’ll probably take a few minutes.”
“Yeah. I’ll be here,” Hollister said, and hung up. He knew he had to do something about the first sergeant problem, even though Vance and Sangean were working on it, too.
The letter was filled with heart-tugging sentences that made him miss Susan more than ever. It was different from his first tour—before they were married.
“From Mama?” Kurzikowski asked.
Looking up from the page, Hollister smiled. “Yeah. She’s making me feel pretty guilty about not writing as often as she does.”
“Hey, get used to it, sir. Women make you feel like you’re steppin’ on your crank all the time.”
“Shouldn’t have married one that was smarter than I am,” Hollister kidded.
“No. I married one that was dumber, and man, that was a real problem. She used to write me and ask questions about needing to change the air in the car tires when I was over here last tour.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her to go ahead and do it. What harm could it do?”
“And?” Hollister asked.
“And she’s married to some E-7 in Fort Belvoir now.”
“Sorry,” Hollister said.
“Oh, don’t be sorry for me. Be sorry for that E-7 at Belvoir. He’s her problem now.”
They got a laugh out of the flip comment. Kurzikowski refilled his coffee cup and Hollister’s from a mess-hall pitcher that someone brought over to Operations. Before he put the pitcher back on the side of the radio bench, the tactical radio net broke squelch and the sounds of hard breathing preceded the message. “Contact! This is Four-four, we have contact!”
In the background the sounds of Ml6s firing could be heard over the small radio speakers.
The room exploded into activity. Kurzikowski dropped the pitcher on the floor, reached up, and tripped the contact siren switch. The siren began to wind up to a high-pitched scream, spurring more activities all over the LRP area.
Pilots shot from the mess hall to their choppers. Crew chiefs rolled out from their slumbering positions on the bench seats of their slicks and began to untie their choppers’ main rotors. Platoon Sergeant Krane, from the 4th Platoon, leaped from the steps of his hooch over the puddle that had collected after the night’s light rain and ran to the slicks to be ready as belly man.
Inside Operations Hollister grabbed
the pork-chop mike and replied, “This is Three. What do you have? Over.”
“We just started taking fire from a tree line four hundred mikes to the northeast,” Decker yelled over the outgoing small-arms fire.
Hollister turned to Cathcart, mouthed the letters “FO” and made a questioning face.
Cathcart reached for the land line and cranked it in an effort to track down Lieutenant Lambert.
“Do you have a target? Can you use arty or snakes? Over.”
“Affirm. I have a fire mission going now on the redleg freq.”
Angry, Hollister reached up and turned the dial on the side of the small speaker that was monitoring the artillery net. It immediately started spurting out the cross talk between Decker’s senior RTO and the artillery-fire direction center at Duc Hue. He shot a look at the other two NCOs who were running the radios.
“You want us to launch a pickup?”
“However this ends up—we’re compromised,” Decker yelled.
“Rog. Stand by. Keep us informed.”
He bent his knees and looked out at the chopper pad for the crews. Captain Edmonds was in the AC’s seat on the C&C, running down the preflight checklist
“The Old Man back from division yet?”
“No, sir,” Kurzikowski said. “Don’t expect he’ll be back for over an hour from what he told me before he left.”
“Get a call into the Division TOC. They’ll know where he is. Let him know what’s going on. I’m going out with Edmonds and the C and C.”
He hadn’t even belted in when Edmonds pulled pitch and got the C&C airborne and out over the wire. Since the artillery was firing already, Hollister decided to leave the gunships back at Cu Chi until it was clear they would be needed. His worry was that he would get the guns out near the team in contact, not get to use them, leaving them in orbit, have to send them back to refuel, and then find that he needed them.
He told Decker he was keeping the Cobras back so that Decker would be able to manage the firepower resources available to him. It was the kind of thing that Hollister had always wanted someone to do for him when he was on the ground. He was conscious that too often the information ran one way—from the mud to the air-conditioned headquarters. Rarely the other way.
En route to Decker’s position, Hollister waited until he was sure Decker wasn’t tied up with adjusting the artillery fire and then called him. “What’s your situation?”
“We’re dropping redleg on the enemy position. We have one minor WIA, and we are good and compromised. The small-arms fire we were getting has stopped. But I’m not sure we got them. Over.”
“Roger. We are zero five out. Give me a panel, and we’ll check out the area for you. How soon can you be ready to come out?” Hollister asked.
“We can be ready in one zero. The PZ is right in front of us.”
“Rog, stand by.”
Hollister called back to Operations and told Kurzikowski to launch the pickup ship, the chase, and the Cobras. He also asked the FAC to stand by to get airborne.
Edmonds took the C&C into a slow descending left-hand turn. The maneuver put Decker’s team directly out the door that Hollister sat in, in the jump seat.
Below him, Hollister could see the long winding strip of green fed by a streambed. Inside the ribbon of trees and bamboo, Decker’s team was trying to hide itself from any more incoming fire, but still make itself visible to the chopper.
Hollister strained to see the orange marker panels through the trees, but had no luck on the first orbit. At the same time he watched the area Decker had identified as the source of the ground fire. It was much easier to distinguish. The trees were splintered and some blown down by several 105mm artillery rounds. There were also three small craters already filling with paddy water.
As they flew over the enemy position, there was no sign of life—or death. So Hollister turned back to look for the team. A glint of sunlight immediately caught his attention. The sharp point of light kept flashing at the chopper—a signal mirror.
Edmonds saw it, too, and took the chopper into a tighter turn.
“Four-four, Three. You got your looking glass out?”
“Affirm.”
“Roger. We have you. Ah … okay. I’ve got your panels now,” Hollister said, finally seeing the markers stretched out in a break in the trees.
“Negative enemy fires since the redleg. You want to take a look-see?”
“Rog, stand by. We’re gonna take a closer look,” Hollister said.
Decker clicked twice.
“You up for a little low-level?” Hollister asked Edmonds over the intercom.
“I live for it!” Edmonds replied, dropping the collective and kicking the chopper into a tight right spiral heading first away from the enemy position and finally toward it.
With the chopper at just about treetop level, Edmonds stopped the descent and rolled the nose of the powerful Huey over to pick up some more airspeed. “Heads up back there. We’re gook bait now.”
“Just give me an okay. We’re ready to go rock and roll,” the door gunner volunteered from the other side of the chopper.
Hollister leaned forward in the jump seat to get a better view of what was coming up ahead and below the chopper. The trees were clipping by, some of them catching the skids of the chopper. It was all a blur of green until Hollister spotted what looked like a change in the color of the vegetation. A dead giveaway. The bushes had been moved, and someone had made an unsuccessful attempt at putting them back only to leave several branches twisted.
A twisted branch shows the texture of the leaves at an angle to the sun that is different from the way it normally grows. That difference in texture shows up in the sunlight as a different color.
Edmonds must have seen it at the same time because he quickly jerked up the chopper’s nose, flaring and slowing its forward speed abruptly. At about the time the chopper lost most of its forward momentum, the disturbed bushes were just below it.
“Stay sharp back there,” Edmonds cautioned the two door gunners, who were training their machine guns on the area around the spot they hovered over. They weren’t as worried about someone shooting straight up at the chopper as they were about someone within range who could get off a few rounds and split before the gunners could spot him.
The downwash of the huge rotor disk blew the bushes violently, revealing the ground below them. The two pilots and Hollister scanned every piece of the area as it was revealed by the thrashing branches.
“Over here!” the copilot announced.
Edmonds slipped the chopper to the right in a skilled maneuver that arrested the forward motion while moving his door over the spot his copilot had pointed out.
“What you got?” Hollister asked.
“Looks like brass and some other packing or something,” the copilot said.
“There, right next to that root outcropping,” Edmonds announced.
There, just outside the left door, was a place under the small trees where someone had been waiting long enough to beat down all the ground cover and the grass growing against one side of a tree trunk.
“Bingo—blood trail!” Edmonds said. “Just to the east of that tangle of roots.”
Hollister looked back at the reference point and let his eyes trace the ground in the direction that Edmonds had called out. Only a few meters from the roots was an area that looked as if someone had attended to a wounded comrade. There was a pool of heavy organ blood and what looked to be deep knee impressions. Bits of rag and a floppy hat were poking out from under a branch felled by the artillery.
“Let’s follow it.”
“Goes this way,” Edmonds said, slipping the chopper away from the spot, down the tree line. As he did the wash peeled away more tree branches and tall grasses revealing a trail of blood and footprints.
“Ho! Shit! Look!” someone yelled over the intercom.
There, standing over a body, was a soldier, hands raised, an AK47 on the ground by his foot. The body a
ppeared to be dead, an arm torn off just above the elbow.
Hollister grabbed his M16 off his lap, spun it toward the VC, and flicked the selector switch from safe to full automatic. He suddenly had to make some decisions. What should he do about the team on the ground, the VC, the flight approaching to pick up Decker’s team?
“Keep him busy while I sort out a couple of things. Okay?”
“Rog. He’s not going anywhere. Lemme ease on around here a bit to make sure this is not an ambush,” Edmonds said, pulling the cyclic over and starting an ascending left turn, keeping the VC in sight.
“Find out the status on the pickup ships while I talk to Decker,” Hollister said.
Edmonds nodded his head, telling Hollister that he had both hands and both feet busy and was talking to someone else on a freq that Hollister wasn’t monitoring. Still, he got Hollister’s message.
“Four-four, we got one in the trees here. What’s your status?”
“We are packed and ready. Do what you gotta do, and we’ll be here,” Decker said.
“Rog. Stand by. Break. Houston, Three. You copy?”
“This is Six. I’m back in the saddle. Rog. You gonna pick up the VC?” Sangean asked through a bit of radio interference from Cu Chi.
Hollister looked up for a signal from Edmonds. “What’s your call? You have any problem with that?” Hollister asked over the intercom.
“Hell, we’ve never captured a POW before. We need to stencil a gook on the fuselage. Let’s do it.”
“Six, Three. We are going to try to pick up this VC, then pick up Four-four and head back.”
“Okay. Keep your head up,” Sangean said, offering an unnecessary caution. Landing a chopper to pick up a frightened VC was much more dangerous than it looked.