by Dennis Foley
Marrietta was an American Indian from Arizona. He had been in the army for seventeen years and knew his business. He wore master parachute wings, was a Pathfinder, a Ranger, and a Jungle Expert. On his right shoulder he wore the combat patch of the 187th Regimental Combat Team. As a corporal in the Korean War, Marrietta served under a young colonel who had become his top general—William C. Westmoreland.
“All right … we ready?” he asked deferentially, glancing to Captain Michaelson. Michaelson nodded. “Lieutenant Hollister, before you start with your part of the debriefing, I thought you’d want to know that we’ve sent the captured weapons and equipment up to Brigade S-2 already. So, they won’t be available for the debrief,” Marrietta added.
“What’s the hurry?” Sergeant Davis asked.
“Seems that this is the first time we’ve captured American weapons that weren’t antiques,” Lieutenant Shaw said from behind Davis.
“That mean something, Lieutenant?”
“Don’t know. There’ve been reports of VC units with newer American weapons, but we haven’t seen it around here before. We don’t know if there’s a different supply channel or if there are new VC priorities in our AO or if it’s just a unit we aren’t carrying on our Order of Battle. We’ll see what the super spooks at Brigade have to say about it.”
“Mind if we get on with this, Sergeant Davis?” Marrietta asked, a little irritated.
“Guess not. Just wondered. We never been in that much of a hurry to do anything before,” Davis offered, slightly under his breath.
Eager to get finished, Hollister looked over at Davis disapprovingly. Catching his boss’s look, Davis reined in his urge to playfully parry with Marrietta.
While Marrietta looked at his notes on the podium and reread the patrol’s mission, Hollister wondered himself about why the VC would suddenly have the newer American equipment. He tried to refocus on Marrietta.
After the adrenaline pumping the team members had just experienced, debriefings were usually boring. As Marrietta droned on—rereading for corrections, the time schedule, and the mission that took the patrol out to that spot on the ground—patrol members searched through crumpled cigarette packs for dry cigarettes, and finished off the cans of beer and soft drinks they had brought in with them.
Wanting to get a head start on the postoperations activities, Doc Norris slipped a combat dressing out of his trousers pocket and began rubbing the remaining camouflage grease from his face.
“Sir, would you start?” Marrietta asked.
Hollister put his soda can down on the floor and swapped hands with his notebook before speaking. “I’m going to let Sergeant Davis handle most of this since I was only acting as patrol leader with his team. So I’ll try to confine my comments to things that were mission specific and let Davis handle the rest.
“Okay, we were running late on the morning of the insert. Our schedule called for First Call at 0415 and breakfast from 0430 to 0500. But at the mess hall the spoons were running late. The cook stoves were not fired up and the coffee wasn’t done.”
“A man can’t be his best without a good breakfast,” Vinson joked.
Hollister shot Vinson a hard look. “We ate C rations, which we had to get from supply. This made us ten minutes late arriving at the chopper pad.”
Wanting to know if he was being listened to, Hollister looked up and caught Marrietta making a note of the problem.
“The ride was uneventful and the insert went off like we had rehearsed it. Oh, I might say that we need to check the choppers better before lift-off. The insert ship had some kind of fuel, like diesel, on the skids that a couple of us got on our boots. The smell stayed with us for most of the first day. I’d hate to lose a team just because some of us smelled like a motor pool.”
The smell was especially irritating because they routinely stopped using soap, shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, or any other cosmetics days before a patrol so that they wouldn’t give themselves away in the bush.
“Contact! Contact! This is Quarterback One-one. We have contact!” The words blasted through the speakers on the radio bench at the other end of the tent.
“Sergeant Marrietta, why don’t we break this off, send these people to chow, and get some weapons cleaned?” Captain Michaelson said. “We can pick it up after we see what One-one’s got.”
The second row reassembled around the radios without waiting for Marrietta to answer. By then a runner had dashed out of the tent to the mess hall, where he passed the word and sent coffee-drinking pilots racing to their choppers.
Even though Michaelson had offered early chow, none of the members of Hollister’s patrol wanted to leave. They were rarely in the Operations tent when enemy contact was made. Each man wanted to watch how smoothly the complicated dance went. They wanted to know that when they called in their own enemy contact the next time, the Operations and Fire Support staff would work like a finely crafted Swiss watch. And they also hoped that their friends on 1-1 were okay. Trying to stay out of the way, they hugged the far wall of the tent and watched, hardly breathing.
The radio crackled again with a situation report from the twenty-two-year-old sergeant who was in charge of Team 1-1. “I have two friendly WIA! Estimated ten Victor Charlie fired on us zero three ago. Small arms, a couple of B-40 rockets, and some ChiCom grenades. They have broken contact. I have requested indirect fire into their location. I think they followed us from the LZ. We are compromised—request immediate extraction. I say again—request immediate extraction. Will keep you posted … Stand by. Out.”
Still seated on a folding chair, Davis held his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees as he listened. “Jackson’s got his shit together,” he said. “If they ain’t blowed ’em away by now, they ain’t gonna stay around in the daylight for us to pound their dicks in the dirt.”
Every radio and field telephone was pressed into service. The tent was buzzing—radio speakers hissed and popped with message traffic, responses, and confirming readbacks. And Team 2-3 didn’t miss any of it.
Captain Michaelson ran out of the tent to go with the launching pickup ships. A third chopper had arrived earlier to allow Michaelson to use Gladiator’s ship as a command-and-control chopper. One would be a pickup, and another a chase ship. All three slicks would rendezvous with Iron Mike’s gunships en route.
To protect 1-1 while it waited for the pickup choppers, the Artillery NCO directed fires onto the coordinates of the last VC sighting. Captain Shaw, Operations officer, ordered a close air-support mission which diverted a pair of Air Force F-4 Phantom jets to the contact site from an air base sixty-five miles away.
At a nearby field table SFC Tillotson, the senior medic, gave the receiving hospital a complete report on the wounded and the estimated arrival time. To reduce possible delays in treatment, he read out the names of all the soldiers on the patrol, their blood types, and any allergies.
Anxious, Hollister walked to the map behind the podium. The location of the 1-1’s last report was marked with a grease-penciled blue box with its team number. He estimated the flight time to be less than twenty minutes.
Quickly, the radio traffic picked up considerably as the choppers got closer to the team. Everyone in the tent could hear Gladiator and Captain Michaelson as they calmly went through the routine of identifying the team. The team leader spoke hurriedly, but with precision. No one missed the sounds of the gunships raining fire around the team, which could be heard in the background of the radio traffic.
Using C-4 plastic explosives, the team dropped two trees to prepare an emergency landing zone. That gave away their exact location, but it was better than trying to make it to the nearest landing zone while four men tried to carry two.
Michaelson’s voice crackled over the small speaker again, confirming the team’s location. “I’ve got you. The slicks are on final. Get those two wounded cowboys on board. We’re going to hold as long as you need. So don’t worry. We’re not going to leave anybody behind
.”
The radios went silent while the pickup took place. Hollister tried to picture the pickup ship and guess how long it would take to touch down, pick up the team, and report coming out. The radio silence seemed to go on much too long. He looked around the tent. Nobody moved. It was the critical moment.
Iron Mike’s was the first voice. “They’re out! Let’s roll in hot for one more pass and then follow Gladiator back to Quarterback base.” Mike Taylor’s message was meant for his wingman, but the Operations tent burst into a scream of triumph. They were out! Coming home.
Easy spoke up. “This calls for a beer.” He went to the Coleman picnic cooler in the corner, only to find it filled with water from ice that had melted during the night.
“Sergeant Marrietta, you think you could keep this cooler stocked? A man could get heat stroke from a shortage of body fluids!”
Marrietta played the game. “Right, First Sergeant. I’ll get right on it.” He turned to Specialist 4 Bernard, the captain’s driver. “What’s wrong with you, Bernard? You want the first sergeant to die here in my Ops tent? ’Cause if he does, you are going to have to haul his ugly butt outa here!” He turned back to Easy. “Ah, no offense, Top.”
Dog tired, Hollister carried his rucksack by the top of the frame and his rifle by its carrying handle as he walked across the LRP compound.
Weathered ridges in the weed-covered ground suggested the strict regimentation of paddy dikes and irrigation ditches, but they had long since been replaced by GP Small tents, a weapons testing area, a vehicle maintenance area, a chopper pad, and a forty-foot-tall wooden wall supported by telephone poles.
The wall was used to train newcomers in rappeling skills, but it actually served as a recruiting device. There was hardly a spot in the sprawling base camp from which you couldn’t see the brightly colored yellow letters LRP painted on the rappeling wall. It didn’t just announce the location of the LRP compound. It was a challenge to some to try to become a LRP. No soldier could see the large letters emblazoned on the wall without wondering if he could hack it.
His eyes had to adjust to the relative darkness of the hooch, but he knew where everything was, and moved automatically as they made the change.
The inside of the hooch always smelled musty. But even that stink was almost covered by the scents of weapons-cleaning solvents, oils, and camouflage sticks. Hollister didn’t care. It smelled much better than the mud spot where he had spent the night, and much better than he did. He just wanted to drop his gear and get cleaned up.
He hung his rucksack on a large spike a previous tenant had sunk into the four-by-four upright supporting the tent’s horizontal ridgepole. He then placed his rifle on a field table and looked around the hooch. He was happy to have a real canvas cot with a clean poncho liner and a small but reasonable excuse for a pillow that he’d bought in a roadside shop. He really didn’t want to know what it was stuffed with. But he did know that whenever it got damp from the rain, it smelled of rice husks.
On his cot the mail clerk had left three envelopes. After a beer, a debriefing, and cleaning his weapon, the first two things every man wanted were his mail and a shower. Everything else could wait.
In addition to the envelopes, there were three daily editions of the Kansas City Star. He picked them up and threw them across the hooch to a pile of others—all still rolled up tightly for mailing from the States.
His parents didn’t understand that to read the Star was a reminder of how far away from home he was. Besides, the news was twelve days to two weeks old, usually out of order, and the papers refused to unroll.
He had tried to read them at first, but his interest in the sports section had simply waned since he had arrived in Vietnam. Still, he didn’t have the heart to tell his mother that he didn’t want to read them.
He picked up the envelopes. One was from Susan, one from Phillips 66 with a printed message across the front: Ease your travels. Put a Phillips 66 credit card in your wallet and a smile on your face.
The absurdity of the offer tickled Hollister. He smiled and mumbled to himself, “Right. That’ll sure ease my travels a lot.”
The return address on the third envelope was from the IRS. Hollister opened it quickly and found a form letter stating that they could not find his 1964 income tax return. Could he advise them? Hollister laughed out loud. Troops in Vietnam were exempt from filing income taxes until they returned to the U.S. His best guess was that he might owe something just over seventy-five dollars. Hell, he only made three hundred dollars a month before taxes.
He dropped the IRS letter on the shaky field table that served as his desk and flipped the Phillips letter into the metal machine-gun ammunition box that was his trash can.
He raised Susan’s letter to his face and searched for a scent of her on the envelope. There was none. It smelled like the rest of the hooch—musty. The letter would be a treat for him after he cleaned his weapon and took a shower. He wanted to open it right up and read each of Susan’s words. But he knew from experience that if he read it right away, he might not get around to the necessities of life before some other crisis came up. And that could be costly.
Resigned to prioritizing his actions, Hollister stripped off his boots and fatigue uniform. He separated his belt from the loops on the trousers and threw the uniform into a pile in the corner.
Wearing no underwear or socks, he inspected himself for damage. Both of his hipbones were raw. One was lacerated by the constant weight and rubbing of his field gear. These spots were on top of sores that had healed many times before. Every patrol marked him.
Someone had fabricated two wardrobe-style lockers out of plywood and ammunition boxes for his hooch. One was his and one was his roommate’s, Lieutenant Lucas—the platoon leader of the first LRP platoon.
Lucas’s half of the hooch was almost a mirror image of Hollister’s. The letters and rolled-up hometown newspapers on the cot meant that Lucas was either out on a patrol or on the R&R he had been waiting for when Hollister left.
It was a team from Lucas’s platoon that had just made the enemy contact. Hollister didn’t envy Lucas. Either Lucas was on R&R and would feel bad about one of his teams getting shot up, or he was out with another patrol and would be pissed that he missed the contact.
Well, that was Lucas’s problem. Hollister stepped over to his locker, flicked a long-legged spider off the shelf with his index finger, and pulled out an olive-drab towel, his shaving kit, and a bar of soap. He searched out his shower shoes under his cot and slipped into them while he wrapped the towel around his waist.
Hollister turned back to the empty half of the hooch and felt a little lonely. He had kind of hoped that Lucas would be there. Lucas was always good for a laugh. A smile crossed his face as he recalled the night just after Christmas, when he and Lucas got stinking drunk at the Brigade Officers Club. So drunk that they had to pay the Vietnamese bartender to lead them back to the LRP compound only a thousand meters from the club.
The next morning, they tried to disguise their hangovers. Captain Michaelson spotted their pain and ordered them to give the demolitions class for the newly assigned LRPs. The blasts from the quarter-pound blocks of C-4 made them think seriously about never drinking again.
Lucas and Hollister always had lots of fun together. Hollister liked being able to talk to someone the same age and rank. They were the only two platoon leaders in the detachment, and shared many of the same problems. Hollister always felt comfortable with Lucas.
Outside his hooch, Hollister felt a little silly walking to the showers with a towel and his shaving gear. He was somewhat self-conscious about his color, pasty-white except for his forearms, neck, and face. Even the tan on his face stopped just above his eyebrows. A sergeant at Officer Candidate School called it a 1542 tan, after the number used to designate the officer specialty of Infantry Small Unit Commander—a platoon leader. For twenty yards around the showers the ground was muddy and very slippery. In the dry season the excess water evapor
ated quickly as the day’s sun baked it away. During the wet season it hardly mattered since everything stayed soggy all day.
The showers consisted of a sturdy wooden scaffolding made out of four-by-fours supporting three salvaged fifty-five-gallon fuel drums painted black to absorb as much heat as possible. At the top of each drum a rifle-cleaning rod attached to a wooden float indicated the water level. Hollister picked one that was almost full and stepped under the simple garden faucet that was the closest they could come to a shower head.
Hollister turned on the spigot and tried to avoid the water, but it came out at a strange angle and quickly ran down his wrist to his armpit. It felt like someone had slapped a cold crowbar against his skin. Determined to overcome the cold, he splashed some water on himself, then a little more. Eventually it got bearable.
Getting the soap out of his close-cropped hair made him wish for some legitimate shampoo instead of a bar of Palmolive. Even without real shampoo he was happy to be able to get the field grime off his skin.
He looked at the distorted image of himself in the tin mirror nailed to one of the uprights. Traces of camouflage stick clung to his ears, nose, and mouth, and the clean areas were reddened from the scrubbing. He lathered again and scrubbed harder.
While he showered, choppers settled on the LRP pad, having returned from picking up Team 1-1.
He pulled down a cheap cherry-colored plastic bowl that someone had left there to be used as a washbasin. Putting the bowl on the wooden pallet between his feet, he gave himself a final rinse. The runoff partially filled the bowl with soapy water.
His face a little cleaner, Hollister looked across the compound toward the chopper pad as he tried to wipe the soapy water from his eyes. Only the two slicks had landed. Four LRPs got out and went through the same arrival ritual that his men had undergone earlier. But for them it was almost without words. They lacked the excitement and spontaneity of his team. Even Easy passed up the chance to badger the troops with his bluster. Hollister guessed that they had taken the wounded to the Brigade hospital on the other side of the base camp before returning to the LRP compound.
