by Dennis Foley
Both team leaders had been in line units in the 173d Airborne Brigade before volunteering to come to Juliet Company. In the time they had been there, both had quickly become team leaders, and each had led more than a dozen patrols and had decent successes on almost all of them.
The two sat a little uncomfortably, so Hollister insisted they each get some coffee or something cold to drink in order to get them to loosen up.
He remembered what it was like being a sergeant and having to spend any time, one-on-one, with a captain. It just wasn’t something that he had felt totally comfortable with, either. To a sergeant, captains were tolerable when they were busy—like in a training situation. But to sit and informally talk about an upcoming mission and how things were going to go would be awkward for Lopaka and DeSouza.
“Either one of you gone out on a heavy team before?”
“I have,” DeSouza said, half raising his hand.
“And?”
“It was an ambush patrol. We set up on a pretty beaten down trail and got our brains baked for five days and six nights—nothing turned up.”
“You got any idea why?’ Hollister asked.
“I think we were busted going in. There had to be a couple hundred zips out there in the fields watching our choppers making the fake and the real inserts. Didn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out what we were doing out there. Guess the word got passed not to use that trail. I’m just glad they didn’t come looking for us.”
“Both of you have Hoi Chanhs?”
“Xinh, the troops call him ‘X-man,’ is a former VC from down in the Delta. Good field troop. Doesn’t say much, but understands everything I say. If you want my recommendation—I want to take him along,” Lopaka said.
“We got one in my team, too. His name is Caps and he …”
Hollister interrupted DeSouza. “Caps? That’s his Vietnamese name?”
DeSouza smiled briefly. “No, sir. He’s got them gold things on his teeth with stuff carved in them—like stars and stuff. His real name is too hard to pronounce, and the team got to calling him Caps. It’s cool with him.”
“Okay. You want to bring him along?”
“I think he’s getting pretty good. He wasn’t a field troop before he was captured. He was a clerk of some type in a base camp just inside Cambodia. He just put his tenth patrol knot on the string he wears around his neck. He’s pretty proud of that.”
“Language skills?”
“His English is just okay. He speaks Cambode, and Viet, of course. He’s good at documents and stuff.”
“We might be able to use that. So let’s count him in on this one.”
Both sergeants nodded.
“You know this is a prisoner snatch?” Hollister asked.
They both nodded again.
“Done one?”
“I have,” Lopaka said. “We grabbed a guy last up on the Vam Co Dong. He was running rice to a tunnel complex. He fucked up. Only guy who was taking rice to the west.”
“What?”
“We were watching a trail, and behind us there was a small canal, that the rear security spotted the guy using. He was buying rice from the farmers going to market and then heading back toward Cambodia with it in his boat.”
“What happened?”
“We dropped the ambush mission and turned the patrol around. We moved into his area and snatched him coming down the canal. He ended up taking the Twenty-fifth Division tunnel rats to his unit.”
“But it didn’t start out as a snatch?”
“Nope. Lucky we were able to watch him for a couple of days—no other threat we could see.”
“Yeah. Well, we’re looking for one that easy. And we are taking Bui along.”
“Bui?” Both team leaders looked surprised.
“He’s a gimp, sir,” said Lopaka. “No offense intended …”
Hollister smiled. “No offense taken, Sergeant Lopaka.”
He leaned over to avoid being overheard by the others in the room. “Bui needs a little shot in the arm. All of his other people are working out fine. It’s a face thing.”
Both men nodded. They understood a man’s need to show that he had whatever it took to be accepted by his peers.
“If he can keep up and keep quiet, it’s okay with me,” DeSouza finally said.
“Same here,” Lopaka said.
“If he doesn’t work out, we’ll adios him,” Hollister said. “It’s not like we are expecting him to do something really critical.”
DeSouza shrugged affirmatively. “Okay.”
“I want you two to run your own teams. A team in each chopper, and on the ground we’ll divide up into a security element and a snatch team. How’s that sound?”
The men responded positively.
“I know what you’re both thinking, but I have no intention of taking over your teams. Just let me honcho the mission, and you decide what your guys do. We’ll just pass mission-type orders down the chain.”
“Good for me, sir,” DeSouza said.
“I’m happy. But who gets the extra, ah …”
“Bodies?” Hollister finished Lopaka’s question.
“Yessir.”
“Okay. Sergeant Lopaka, you make no changes.” Hollister looked at DeSouza. “You got me and Bui on your chopper and in movement and security. If we get a live one, he goes out with Lopaka to even the loads.”
“We know how long?”
“Five days—for now,” Hollister replied. He put his coffee cup down and glanced at his watch. “How about the patrol order tomorrow morning at zero nine hundred?”
The sergeants wrote down the time.
That night Hollister stayed up until almost two finishing paperwork. He had grown to hate the large number of reports that were demanded of Operations by IIFFV, MACV, USARV, and the company’s internal needs. He seemed to spend endless hours describing operations, reporting on numbers, and explaining successes and failures of patrols.
His problems with the growing paper demand began as soon as he got back from the hospital. Colonel Downing, the G-3, had been reassigned, and his replacement, Colonel Schneider, was demanding greater detail and more volume. Sangean had tried to explain it to Hollister but Hollister didn’t much understand the army’s new attitude about quantifying everything. Downing’s replacement was just out of grad school at Harvard and had a shiny new degree in Operations research and systems analysis. It was shit, but it all rolled downhill.
It still got to him that every time he saw the same information consolidated into reports, the descriptions looked quite different. He decided not to worry about what he couldn’t change.
The CQ knocked on Hollister’s door to let him know it was four A.M. He thanked the unseen soldier and swung his feet over the bunk and onto the cool concrete floor. His head was foggy, and he wasn’t sure if he really wanted to go run with a patrol coming up the next morning. He reached for his cigarettes and lit one.
Sitting there in the dark, Hollister tried to take the first quiet moment he could remember in days to get things organized in his head. He had things to do—simple things like getting his gear ready to go. He had to write to Susan—which meant he wouldn’t tell her he was going out. Still, he wanted to get a letter off to her. He owed one to his parents, and he still had a whole day’s work ahead of him before he could get ready to go out.
He had promised the two team leaders that he would go over immediate-action drills with their teams that afternoon, and he wanted to spend some time with Bui. He elected not to go on his morning run, but to take PT with the company when they fell out an hour later.
He grabbed his trousers, put them on, and searched in the dark for his shower shoes. Finding them, he headed for the shitter—twenty yards outside the officers’ hooch.
Bui reported to Operations with his combat gear packed and ready to be inspected. Hollister had told him that he wanted to check him out before DeSouza did. What he really wanted to do was keep Bui from being embarrassed in front of X-man and Cap
s in the event he had something wrong.
He told Kurzikowski they would be in the briefing room and took Bui in for inspection. Once there, Bui stood at as much of a position of attention as he could with his damaged ankle.
Hollister started with Bui’s rifle. He had drawn and cleaned an M16. Hollister took it, cleared it, and inspected it. Bui had done a good job of cleaning it and had even removed the sling and taped down the sling swivels for noise suppression.
“Ammo?”
Bui opened his two ammo pouches and showed Hollister the loaded magazines. Hollister looked at a couple of them and raised his eyebrows.
Bui took the gesture as a question and yanked the quick release on his rucksack shoulder strap. The ruck swung off his back, and he held it off the floor by catching it as it fell, while holding the strap in the crook of his other arm. He then lowered the ruck to the ground and started unbuckling the side pouch which held more magazines.
Hollister checked them, the others inside the ruck, and all of the other equipment. He was fairly well satisfied with Bui’s preparations, and told him so. Still, it was just packing at that point. “You fire this rifle?”
“No, sir. Not yet I have not.” Bui said. His English had improved considerably during his months with Juliet Company.
“Well, you better zero it,” said Hollister. “Let’s get some loose ammo and go over to the range.”
Bui smiled and hoisted his ruck back up.
The compound had a large slash cut into the ground from a couple of side-by-side swipes of an engineer’s D-9 Caterpillar tractor.
Someone had realized the shortage of suitable areas for a small rifle range. Due to the numerous villages surrounding the base and the density of the Bien Hoa complex, there hadn’t been one. The solution was to cut a short range into the ground and pile up a very high berm on two sides and the back end. It was only twenty-five yards long and ten wide, but it allowed the LRPs to test-fire weapons and small demolitions without endangering anyone.
Bui finished placing ten empty M16 ammo cartons on the dirt, halfway up the berm, and walked back to Hollister at the firing point. He looked to Hollister for an okay.
Handing him his rifle, Hollister pointed down-range. “Go ahead.”
Bui took the rifle, seated a magazine in the well, and tapped it with the heel of his hand. Raising it to his shoulder, he changed his footing to get a better alignment and sighted down the barrel. Flipping the selector switch off safe, he fired a round at the first small box. He missed it by three inches. The second round hit it on the top and knocked it over. He walked the rounds down the line and hit eight out of ten of the boxes the first round.
The marksmanship was certainly acceptable to Hollister, but he detected a kind of discomfort in Bui. He waited until Bui took the rifle down from his shoulder, then asked, “You like this rifle?”
Bui hesitated and then shook his head. “No. But it okay. I can shoot it.”
“No,” said Hollister. “You don’t have to. What did you carry? AK47?”
“Sometime.”
“You like it better?”
Bui smiled and nodded. “Sorry, but the AK better.”
“Then let’s get you one. We have plenty. Okay?”
Bui cleared his M16 and locked it on safe.
“Sure, it okay.” He smiled. “AK better than the Bangalore torpedo.”
Hollister frowned. “Bangalore torpedo?”
“Sure,” said Bui. “You don’t remember I was sapper before, Cap’n?”
“Well, Bui,” said Hollister, “you keep up, and you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren someday that you served with the best either side can offer—first the sappers, then the LRP.”
The team leaders each ran the immediate-action drills with their teams, and then Hollister ran them with the combined patrol. Everyone watched Bui to see how fast he could move with his bad leg. He moved well enough, but with no grace or fluid movement. It was obvious to all that the movements were painful for him, and they began to respect him for his efforts.
Hollister could feel the pain caused by the extra weight of his own field gear. He wondered if he had bitten off too much. Bui’s example told him he hadn’t.
As they finished practicing for enemy contact and rehearsing movement formations, they called it a day. It was getting dark, and no one had eaten supper. Hollister suggested they eat together. DeSouza volunteered to make the arrangements with Sergeant Kendrick to set aside enough food to feed the two teams together.
As Hollister turned to walk to the officers’ hooch, he caught sight of T.T. peeking out of the doorway behind the bar—watching Bui.
Chapter 24
IT WAS LATE, AND Hollister was still not caught up. He finished a cold, stale cup of coffee and lit the last cigarette in his pack. He finished proofreading yet another paper in the endless trail of papers that had come to be too big a part of his war.
For a fleeting second, he remembered how he almost never had to look at a full piece of paper when he was a platoon leader in an Airborne Battalion—first tour.
He felt the tension in the back of his neck, and tried to work it out with his hand. The effort was not completely successful. He gave up on it and reached for a cigarette, but remembered that he had one burning in the C ration can ashtray on his desk.
The radios were fairly quiet for nearly midnight. Four teams were on the ground—all in ambush positions. A fifth team was moving, having been compromised by an old woman moving through their position late in the day. She convinced the Hoi Chanh with the team that she was looking for roots to cure her aching joints. They let her go, but didn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut. So after selecting an alternate ambush site and PZ, they plotted a route and moved out around nineteen hundred. The fact that they hadn’t reached their new ambush site and reported in was another item nagging at the base of Hollister’s neck.
Knowing he would be wearing his boots for days and already feeling the discomfort of the laces cutting into the tops of his feet, Hollister reached down and untied the knot. He then loosened the laces, pulling slack into each X that crossed the tongue.
A cook came into Operations with a mess tray loaded down with sandwiches. “Anybody hungry in here? If’n you-all don’t eat this stuff, we’ll have to give it to the garbage collectors in the morning.”
Lopaka, who was copying down some information off the situation map, turned to the cook. “Oh, fucking great, brudda. You gonna eetha feed it to us or to the pigs.”
There were a few laughs, but everyone in the room headed for the tray.
Putting out his cigarette, Hollister stood and walked to the tray. Without even thinking about it, he automatically waited for all the others to get a sandwich first. An old habit—officers eat last.
When he finally did grab a sandwich, it was a masterpiece that could only have come out of an army mess hall in Vietnam. It was two pieces of bread surrounding a three-quarter-inch slab of ham. The ham was cooked till almost dry, and the bread had been cut by an amateur. Some of the slices were a half inch thick, and others were thick only at one end and tapered to a paper thinness on the other end.
He didn’t care. Food was food, and he was tired and hungry. Hollister took a bite, holding tight to avoid the possibility of the ham sliding out of his grasp, leaving him with a pair of bread slices.
Sandwich in hand, he returned to his paperwork.
It was just a little after three-thirty when the runner came to Hollister’s room and rolled him out of the rack. He had an Operations Summary for the previous twenty-four hours for Hollister to sign. Signing the day’s report that was typed up, unprofessionally, after midnight always meant that Hollister was awakened in the middle of the night so that it could be driven over to IIFFV and be there before zero five hundred. It was Fowler’s requirement and an absolutely chickenshit one at that.
Hollister signed it, knowing that the report would probably be rewritten and distorted before first light.
His
mouth tasted foul. The double shot of Scotch he’d had before sacking out was the cause. It had become his new sleeping pill. It worked for him, and he rationalized it by a self-declaration that without a drink it would take him too long to get to sleep. If that happened, he wouldn’t get any rest at all.
It made no difference. He still woke up each morning feeling like shit. But he had no time to baby his sour stomach and dull, throbbing forehead. He had to get ready to launch.
The full patrol was on line—on time. Lopaka and DeSouza had their teams out at the chopper pad and were inspecting their gear when Hollister arrived. He found a spot at the end of DeSouza’s team and dressed right.
DeSouza stepped in front of Hollister and was surprised to find him waiting for inspection. “Ah, good mornin’, sir.”
“Morning. You want to check me out?”
“You? Sure,” DeSouza answered, a little uncomfortable with the thought of inspecting a captain.
“You are in charge of your chopper load of yahoos. If you were a jumpmaster on a jump—wouldn’t you jumpmaster-inspect each man in your lift?”
“Yessir.”
“Then get to it.”
DeSouza straightened up, as if that were a statement of his official capacity, and began at Hollister’s cap. He continued to check out his weapon and all of his combat gear, head to toe. When he was finished with the front, he walked around to Hollister’s back and started at the top again.
Finally, satisfied with everything he could see and touch in the faint light coming from the bulb at Operations, he told Hollister to jump up and down.
The gear was noiseless, but there was an ammo pouch that had ripped through itself and had only one clip holding it to Hollister’s rucksack webbing. It became obvious when Hollister jumped.
DeSouza reached down and pulled a piece of green tape off his trousers. He had pretorn several such strips and gently stuck them to his trouser leg for just such a need.