by Dennis Foley
“Can do, easy, Dai Uy,” Keith said, scratching himself and trying to let his eyes adjust to the lights in Operations.
“You flying the C and C?”
“Nope. I lost the last hand, and Edmonds is pulling rank. He’s air mission commander, and I’m ACing on the pickup slick.”
“Get a cup of coffee, and go secure all that money you won playing poker tonight so you can fly with a clear head and a clear conscience,” Hollister kidded him.
Keith didn’t respond. He just waved and stepped back out the doorway.
He was replaced in the door by Platoon Sergeant McCullen, 1st Platoon’s senior NCO.
Hollister was glad to see him. He had known McCullen in Fort Benning. When Hollister was an officer candidate going through training, he had met McCullen on a live-fire exercise. He was impressed then with the newly promoted staff sergeant’s cool and bearing.
There had been enough years in between for McCullen to make platoon sergeant and then be selected for promotion to master sergeant. He was due to sew on his new chevrons in a month.
His promotion had been a matter of much discussion around Juliet Company. Since they still had not received an acceptable replacement for First Sergeant Morrison, McCullen was being considered for the job. It was not something he particularly relished. He was a field soldier and bristled at the suggestion that he might ride a desk.
“Sergeant Mac,” Hollister said. “We might have to pull One-three. You want to ride belly?”
“You ready to go?”
“Not yet. We need to make the decision here in a few minutes. If they’re going to come out, we need to pull them in time to make the next two inserts before first light. If we get late on this, we will screw the two teams going in.”
“Is it just movement or movement toward them?”
“They haven’t said yet. You want to talk to them on their next SITREP? Here are some questions I need to know about,” Hollister said, handing McCullen his list.
“Yessir,” McCullen said, taking the list. “I’ll get ’em squared away.” He picked up the field phone and called one of the team hooches to get a team leader out of the sack to go and check the rigging on the chase ship while he made the radio contact with 1-3.
Lieutenant Lambert had entered while Hollister was talking to McCullen and was already on the land line to his battery, working up a fire mission and cross-checking the planned targets they had plotted in case the team needed to be pulled under fire.
Captain Stanton stood in the doorway, an unlit cigar stub in his mouth, wearing his Nomex trousers, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap with his bars and wings on it. His boots were in his hand. “Guess this means the guns are on the clock now, too. Huh?”
“Yeah,” Hollister said, smiling at the always happy Stanton. “Why don’t you hang out over at the mess hall, and I’ll give you guys an update as soon as I get something from the team.”
“Houston. One-three,” the voice whispered over the small speaker in Operations.
McCullen grabbed the mike and replied. “This is One-six Alpha. Gimme your SITREP.”
“We have more movement. Don’t know if they know we’re here. But they’re so close their security might bump into us. If that happens we’re in the shitter. Counted seventy-two figures moving west to east on canal road. Carrying small arms. Have called for arty—no fires yet. Can you do something?”
Hollister didn’t wait to hear anymore. “Let’s launch! Hit the horn!”
McCullen never needed to ask the questions on Hollister’s list.
The RTO reached up and threw the toggle switch mounted on the wall to trip the contact siren. The siren hadn’t even reached the top of its volume when Captain Vance jumped up on the step and entered Operations. He found Hollister talking to McCullen.
“You tell them gunships are on the way,” Hollister said to McCullen. He looked at Lambert. “You get fucking arty in there for them. No—you get your radio and come with me!”
Turning to leave, Hollister scooped up his claymore bag and his M16 and almost ran into Vance. “You want me to take this one?” Vance asked.
“Naw. I know where they are, have to be out there in a couple hours to put in a pair of teams anyhow. No sense both of us fucking up a night made for sleeping.”
“You sure?” Vance asked.
“I’m sure. If you want to do anything, stand by here and help these folks kick some ass. I got a feeling all the work is going to be done from here tonight—or not at all.”
Vance tapped Hollister on the shoulder in a gesture of good luck, then turned to the radios.
The knot in Hollister’s stomach couldn’t have been tighter. He hated night contacts. They were the hardest to manage from a chopper. The confusion factor was as high as it could get. His worst fears were all built into a night contact. He could lose a team and not even have spotted their location on the ground. He could get a team split up and have to find a lost LRP. He could run into aircraft trouble and have to put a chopper crew down with a crippled ship.
The lights of the other choppers were about the only lights he could see. The rain reduced the visibility to about a mile, and the ceiling was not much more than two thousand feet.
Inside the chopper a spray of water soaked Hollister and Lambert to the skin as they crossed the wire on the far side of the base camp. Hollister grabbed a cigarette while he could, knowing that when they got to the team’s location things would pick up to a pace that would surely not allow one. He offered one to Lambert.
Lambert shook his head. “The fire mission is being held up by the ARVNs,” he yelled to Hollister, pulling his handset from his ear.
“Shit!” Hollister said. “Go up the chain. Tell your FDO that my troops have a visual on the target. If he can’t get around the ARVNs, then get someone on it who can. Tell him the minute they take fire I want artillery—ARVNs or no fucking ARVNs!”
Lambert nodded and talked back into his handset.
“Guns are already there. One just took some ground fire and is rolling in on it,” Edmonds said over the intercom.
“They have the team located?”
“Yeah. They were on the insert and knew the general location. The team leader and Stanton worked it out.”
Hollister leaned out to try to see the contact up ahead of the C&C. Edmonds was flying to a point north and east of the team’s location to clear airspace for the artillery to fire from the southeast.
“Gunships are gonna have to move out,” Lambert yelled to Hollister.
“I know,” Hollister said, looking out in front of them at the rotating beacons of the two Cobras on the black horizon.
“Contact! Contact! This is One-three, we have contact!”
Hollister’s heart sunk a bit. He had a feeling that once the gun-ships started firing on the enemy troops, DeSouza’s team would be sucked into it. He had hoped the C&C would have reached the contact site before the team got involved. “One-three, Three. Roger. What’s your situation?”
“I’m still not sure if they know we’re here, but we are taking ineffective fire.”
“Have you returned fire yet?”
“Negative. We want to find out if they’re reconning by fire or what.”
Hollister was pleased to hear that the training was getting to the troops. “Okay, hold tight. We are inbound your location. Stand by for extraction. You have a PZ, don’t you?”
“That’s affirm—the primary we selected and plotted. Will hold fire. Will prep for extraction,” DeSouza said.
Hollister looked at his map and the grease-penciled oval marked as DeSouza’s PZ. He looked out again to confirm its location in respect to two distinctive terrain features—a very straight roadway running parallel to a canal and an intersecting intermittent stream.
The contact came into plain view for Hollister as Edmonds took up an orbit above the gun runs. The Cobras were rolling in without letting up on the long road-canal combination. The enemy troops had taken what little cover there
was in the canal and on the embankment on the other side of the road.
Stanton and his wingman were rolling in on pass after pass, running parallel to the linear target, dumping pairs of rockets on each pass, and stitching the embankment with minigun fire.
Lambert had managed to get the artillery to fire flares. The first one made only a bright glow in the sky over the contact—the light diffused by the clouds and the steady rain.
“This is some bad shit to fly in. It’s getting a little heavier, and the forecast is for more of the same,” Edmonds said over the intercom.
“Rog. Stand by,” Hollister replied. He flipped the toggle switch to transmit on the tactical frequency. “Reptile Six, you about out of ordnance?”
“We’re about five minutes from having to go home. I have a backup team of guns en route now. Hold on …”
Hollister looked over at the lead gunship and saw that he was rolling in on still another pass. As he lifted his nose and broke right, trying to gain altitude, green tracers leaped up for the underbelly of the Cobra from a spot on the roadway that looked to be a culvert or some kind of lock for the canal.
Before anyone said anything else over the radio, the second Cobra rolled in on the culvert and quickly silenced the fire with his grenade launcher. Round after round puffed from the nose-mounted barrel, detonating on impact along the canal and the paddy next to it.
There were two large secondary explosions.
“Okay, I’m back,” Stanton said. “Looks like we hit the demo man. Anyway, we have the other guns about zero three out.”
“What do you think you got down there?”
“I don’t think there’s much of anyone left alive down there. Lots of them scattered and got away when they heard us coming. Guess we got about fifteen of them.”
“Rog. Stand by. Break. One-three, can you see the damage?”
“This is One-three. Affirm. There doesn’t seem to be much left.”
“Okay, Reptile. You got enough time and ordnance left to cover the C and C if we go down and take a look? I can’t pull that team if the ground is still crawling with bad guys.”
“That’s affirm. You can get a reckie out of me with no problem.”
“Okay, you guys game up front?” Hollister asked Edmonds and the peter pilot.
“Let’s go look.”
Hollister turned to Lambert. “Can we get any fucking artillery in here this week?”
“Yessir. Now that we’ve had the contact, they are going to clear it.”
“Tell them I’m going to clear someone’s ass out when I get back!” Hollister said, clearly angry at the crap Lambert got requesting the fires. “Keep the illum going. We’re going down for a look.”
Lambert nodded.
Edmonds dropped out of the sky to treetop level, causing Hollister’s stomach to feel flutter. Reaching a point just above the highest treetops, Edmonds sucked in enough power to arrest the descent and level the flight out at forty-five knots.
He had taken a long, sweeping path away from the target area while he was losing altitude, and now began a hard turn back toward the target.
Hollister steeled himself for the short flight into the target area. He patted his rifle to reassure himself that it was still in place on the bench seat next to him. He also slipped the sling from the claymore bag onto his shoulder. If he had to get out of the chopper, he didn’t want to have to look for his bag or rifle.
He wasn’t too worried about the spare PRC-77 he had with him. He had it on a backpack and had his right foot through one of the shoulder straps. If he got out, he could easily find and drag the radio with him.
Edmonds flipped on the chin light, and the ground below the chopper turned into a white-lit scene of mostly water and roadway.
“Comin’ up on ’em,” Edmonds announced over the intercom. Almost without taking another breath, he reacted to what he saw. “Jesus Christ! Will you look at this?”
There, beneath the chopper, were at least forty bodies on the left—against the road embankment—and an equal number on the other side, floating in the canal—out of Hollister’s view.
“Let me go past them and come back, Jim,” Edmonds said.
Hollister looked out and down at the carnage through the misty rain lit up by the searchlight. They were NVA. That took a load off his mind. He had a nagging worry that they might have mistaken farmers or other civilians for VC. But they were NVA. Most had pieces of uniforms on, while some wore black pajamas. Rifles and RPG rounds were the most recognizable military items. Some bits of clothing and hats were also floating in the paddy water. Hand-carried cargo was everywhere. Rice bags, ammo, medical supplies, papers—lots of papers. Some kind of dye or ink was evident in one corner of the paddy water, and on two of the bodies. Hollister guessed that it was either the pigment from a smoke grenade—or maybe just ink.
Edmonds came to a point beyond the bodies and made a hard turn, doubling back on his own line of flight. The maneuver put the canal outside the left side of the chopper, where Hollister could see it.
The dead there were almost identical to the others on the far side of the road. Splintered wood littered the banks of the canal. Some kind of boat or sled had been used to carry supplies. Some of the cargo could be seen under the water when the intense helicopter searchlight cut through it. The water was running with streaks of blood.
“New guns have reported on station,” Edmonds said. “You got any plans to walk the team over here to have a look?”
“Negative. They’re too far away to walk across open paddy fields. One live VC with a weapon would have their ass.” Hollister looked at his watch. “We okay on fuel?”
“Yep. We still got pretty close to an hour left.”
“Okay. I want to get that team out, then get someone in here to look through the debris for anyone or anything,” Hollister said.
“Houston, Three. We got a pretty good body count out here. I need a ground element—large enough to provide its own security while they search the battle area.”
“This is Five,” Vance replied from Cu Chi. “Roger. We are on it.”
“I also want you to launch the pickup ships to pull One-three,” Hollister said.
“They are lifting off now,” Vance said.
“I also need you to stand by to replace me in another slick in case this gets screwed up.”
“Count on it.”
Hollister took a deep breath to relax a bit. He really liked having Peter Vance on the other end of the radio.
It took the slicks twenty minutes to get to 1-3’s PZ. The slicks, the C&C, and the new gunships got into a pickup formation and headed for DeSouza’s team.
Hollister had released Stanton’s guns to rearm and refuel at Cu Chi for the routine inserts that were scheduled to take place as soon as Hollister could get 1-3 out and refuel the C&C.
The radios got quiet. Hollister watched the new Cobras prowl the PZ as the pickup and chase ships slowed into the landing zone, only fifteen meters from the small tuft of weeds, bamboo, and trees that concealed DeSouza’s team.
The lead pilot switched on his searchlight as he flared to put the chopper down. In the halo of light that spilled onto the wet paddy under the chopper’s belly, Hollister could see the team running toward the left door in the chopper. He counted them, one, two, three, four, five—five. Shit! There was a man missing.
“What’s going on?” Hollister yelled over the tactical freq. “There’s a man missing!”
“He was right behind us!” a breathless DeSouza said from inside the pickup chopper, waiting dangerously on the PZ.
“Can you see him?”
“Negative,” DeSouza said.
Just then the gunship on the far side of the PZ—out the right door of the pickup ship—spit a burst of minigun fire from its nose to a point in front of the pickup ship. The pickup pilot yelled, “We’re taking fire! We’re taking fire!”
“Get out of there!” Hollister yelled. “Don’t wait!” he said to the pick
up ship.
The pilot heard him, but didn’t reply. From Hollister’s position in a tight orbit, only a few hundred feet above the pickup chopper, he could see the pickup pilot dump his searchlight and roll forward for a full-power takeoff. As he did, he tried to get enough altitude and airspeed to be able to break hard right to keep from overflying the location the gunships were blistering with minigun fire.
The chase ship had passed over the pickup ship when it touched down and was already in a lower orbit than the C&C.
Hollister finally took a breath when the pickup ship had made the hard U-turn and was heading up and away from the enemy position—still taking occasional tracer fire.
“Okay?” Hollister half asked Edmonds.
“Seems to be. But he’s still one man short. The crew told me that they think they saw him still inside the trees.”
“How much time we got?”
“’Bout thirty minutes—then it’s Texaco time.”
“One-three, Three. Talk to me,” Hollister told DeSouza over the radio.
From his place inside the orbiting pickup ship, DeSouza responded. “We got out of the trees. Made it across the paddies, and when I hit the skids I looked back and he wasn’t there. I have no idea what happened to him.”
“Okay. Does he have any commo or signal equipment?”
“Affirm. He’s carrying a second fox mike radio.”
“You try to call him?”
“Affirm. But I’m on a short antenna. No reply. Want me to try again?”
“Negative. Let me. Break. Houston One-three Bravo, this is Houston Three. Over.”
Everyone held his breath again waiting for a reply. Finally, the silence in Hollister’s headset was broken by two squelch breaks.
“One-three Bravo, this is Three. Did you just break squelch?”