Long Range Patrol: A Novel of Vietnam (The Jim Hollister Trilogy Book 1)

by Dennis Foley

  The cheese with caraway was beginning to run from the heat. Hollister didn’t care one way or the other. It was something to satisfy the hunger pangs and required no serious preparation to eat.

  He was careful not to put too much pressure on the fragile C-ration cracker as he scooped some of the cheese onto it. He had gotten pretty good at eating the crackers in such a way as to end up with a pointed wedge of cracker which he could use to get the cheese out of the right angles at the bottom of the small cans.

  A bug landed in the last bit of cheese and became helplessly mired in the yellow goo. It was enough to end Hollister’s meal. He collected the cans and put them aside to take with him when he answered a call to nature. Using the single entrenching tool that the patrol carried, he would bury everything at the same time.

  The afternoon dragged on. Hollister took turns on the radio, spelling Theodore, allowing him to get some food, sleep, and a trip outside the perimeter to relieve himself. Bored, he rechecked the firing wires that led from the perimeter to a point nearly level with it on the lazy finger that led away from their perimeter, to a Claymore. It was part of the protection that they had laid in along with other Claymores, independent of the demolitions in the stream.

  Satisfied with the Claymore, Hollister sat back in a small column of shade and tried to occupy his mind to kill the time. He decided that he would try to compose a letter to Susan in his head.

  He went over the recent events since his last letter to find items he could share with her. He watched Theodore stirring cocoa powder in cool water from his canteen. He knew without looking that Theodore had a mixture of brown liquid and lumps. The lumps would take a long time to dissolve, and many of them would never dissolve.

  Ultimately, Theodore would tire of stirring and wipe the caked powder off the plastic spoon. He would then drink the lumpy liquid and then try to get the clumps out of the canteen cup with his fingers. If he didn’t get the caked cocoa out of the cup right away, it would be like chipping cement off the inside of the cup once they got back to the base camp.

  A sound snapped the heads of every man in the perimeter. It was a single-engine airplane. The droning engine brought fear to all. They knew that there was no bird dog laid on to provide radio relay or tactical air support to the patrol.

  It meant that whoever was flying the plane was not part of their operation and could stumble on them and then either circle them to try to figure out who they were or assume they were bad guys and fire on them. Hollister remembered how the province chief gave out free fire instructions for that part of the Province. He knew that they were in as much jeopardy from the bird dog as the wood poachers had been when he and Iron Mike had spotted them.

  He quickly motioned for Theodore to get out the fluorescent marker panels. He took the handset while Theodore and Cullen spread the marker panels out in the pool of sunlight spilling through the hole in the canopy.

  Before he spoke into the handset, Hollister stood up and looked out through the treetops toward the source of sound. It was an olive-drab L-19, rather than a gray one like the Air Force used. It meant that the airplane belonged to the Army or even one of the allies—like the Koreans. It had also changed its direction from straight and level flight to a large, lazy circle over their position.

  He had a sinking feeling that it was a failure in coordination that had allowed the plane to wander into his position. It was certain that someone had not warned the pilot of the bird dog that friendlies were on the ground, so he had to assume that the pilot would think that any movement on the ground was hostile.

  Cupping the mouthpiece, Hollister pressed the button on the side of the handset. “Quarterback, this is Two-six. I’ve got an Oscar one circling my location. Can you help get him off my back? Over.”

  Captain Shaw answered the call and asked for a tail number.

  “Can’t read it yet. It’s an Oscar delta colored aircraft, though. Over.”

  “Rog. Let me get on it. Call me if you can catch the number. Out.”

  His response was enough for Hollister. If Captain Shaw said so, Hollister could be sure that he would take care of it.

  Every man in the perimeter knew what Hollister was doing and held his breath to see if there was any change in the flight path of the small airplane. It made one more lazy circle that put the LRP position off center but still inside the circle.

  Hollister pulled out his SOI and looked up the air-to-ground frequency to attempt to make a direct call to the aircraft. It was a last resort effort that he didn’t want to have to take. Making contact with a stranger meant too much conversation on the radio—adding to the risk of being overheard on the ground. But it looked like he was going to have to make the call, when it suddenly turned out from its orbit and made an exaggerated wag of its wings.

  The signal was a universal statement of understanding. It was the pilot’s way of telling those on the ground that he got the word and would not be a threat to them. He continued to make a new orbit on the hilltop south of the perimeter, as if it was of equal importance to him as the last orbit.

  Hollister raised the handset to his face and called in the situation. “Quarterback, this is Two-six. You did it. He’s gone hunting somewhere else. Thanks. Out.”

  The base answered with a double break in the squelch.

  Happy that was behind him, Hollister passed the handset back to Theodore, but suddenly a distressed look crossed his face. He quickly looked around the perimeter and spotted the lone entrenching tool. Snatching it with one hand and his rifle with the other, he signaled to Theodore that he was stepping out of the perimeter—in a hurry.

  Hollister didn’t know if the diarrhea was from his generally skittish stomach or the malaria tablets that he had to take early that morning. Mondays were always the worst for him.

  It was the one day of the week that each man in Vietnam had to take the daily and the weekly pill at the same time. As he squatted over the small hole he had made with the entrenching tool, he thought of Easy. Hollister was also the detachment Malaria-Control officer and was responsible for making sure that the medics administered the daily and the weekly antimalaria pills.

  He made one last check of the perimeter before the sun slipped beyond the horizon. Settling into his position for the night, Hollister began to lay out things he needed to reach for in the dark. Everything else was tied down and ready for a quick scramble out of the perimeter.

  After dark the mosquito factor went up dramatically. Hollister tried to tough out the constant buzzing and the bites without moving around to swat at them. Most of it was just bearable, except the mosquitoes that hovered around his eyes and his ears. He took the cravat from around his neck and squirted more bug repellent into it. After putting the bottle back into his pocket, he dabbed the wet spot on the cravat around his eyes and on his ears. A small drop of the liquid mixed with the sweat on his eyebrow and slid into his eye.

  The burning sensation was enough to cause his eyelid to quiver in convulsive muscle contractions. He hated mosquitoes! He hated the night.

  It was almost nine P.M. when he checked his watch for the third time that hour. The night was dragging on. Everyone was awake and anxious about the ambush. Still, nothing was happening. There was no movement, no unusual sounds from the stream below, and the time just continued to drag on.

  Hollister decided to try to finish his letter in his head. He felt the twinge of desire for Susan. He let himself get sucked into thinking about his last night with her, and forgot where he was or what he was waiting for. He knew better, but decided to compromise and allow himself just a few special seconds to relive the moments with her in his mind and then get back to work.

  For a moment the damp night, the mosquitoes, and the hardness of the ground were gone and he was back in New York at Susan’s apartment with her. He tried to remember how she smelled. It was a delicious memory.

  An explosion went off in the hills to the north of them—artillery, H&I fire. Hollister’s blood raced in
anger. He knew that the ARVNs were shooting the harassing fire into the area owned by Colonel Minh, in spite of the fact that he and Michaelson had made a point up the chain of command that there were friendly wood poachers in the area. He was angry, but the perimeter overlooking the stream ambush was hardly the place to sustain it.

  He tried to calm himself and get back to the mental letter writing. His reverie of Susan was shattered again by the 105 round hitting in some trees along a trail several miles from their location.

  Shifting his position to get off of a spot on his hip growing numb from inactivity, Hollister’s stomach started to rumble a little. He decided to take a chance on overcorrecting the problem by taking another one of the antidiarrhea pills that Doc Briskin gave him earlier.

  The night droned on with the chorus of night creatures, but still nothing happened on the stream. By the time midnight came and went, Hollister was starting to wonder if there would be any traffic at all. He hoped that even though they hadn’t seen any sampans going downstream, it didn’t mean there weren’t any that had been hidden downstream that would be coming back up.

  His hopes started to fade around four in the morning when the dark was the blackest and the time moved at a painfully slow pace. He tried to keep himself awake by convincing himself that if he started to drift off, there was a chance that the VC could slip by without being seen.

  He tried all of his usual tricks to keep his eyes open. The effort was agonizing and he was failing, miserably. He found a rock with several edges on it and slipped it under his left hip. As he put his weight back on the hip, the pain that the small rock caused woke him up—a little.

  Dawn came and bones begged for sunlight. The first priority was warm up, then recheck everything, then sitreps, then something to eat, then touch up the personal and position camouflage, send out a small party to check around their perimeter for security, check the Claymores and the wires down to the ambush demo—then wait for another night.

  For Hollister and the others, the day followed the previous one—an almost identical copy. The only difference was that their whiskers were longer, they had less food in their rucksacks, their eyes were redder, their patience was diminished, and their anxieties grew larger. No LRP liked to stay anywhere in the bush any longer than he had to. The longer they stayed in position the more likely they were to be discovered by the VC.

  Hollister tried to figure out why they had sampan traffic on the stream the night they were inserted but none since. Had they been discovered going in? He was sure that they had picked a good insert point and created enough diversions on a nearby hilltop to telegraph their intentions to a completely different area. Maybe it was just a fluke.

  Hollister checked his watch—another midnight. He was tired of waiting. Nothing again. No movement on the stream, no sign or sound of any kind of enemy activity in the foothills or the valley below. He wondered what had gone wrong. He decided to kill the time by going over everything from the moment that he got the warning order. He might find something there.

  It was over an hour later when he mentally relived the coordination of the Operations plan. He remembered the argument between Captain Michaelson and Colonel Baird over providing incomplete overlays to Province Operations and their Fire Support Coordinator. He knew that Baird’s bitch was that they were being given a large piece of real estate and only told that operations would be conducted there. No specifics.

  It had been Michaelson’s decision to not inform the Vietnamese where and when the team was going in until the choppers were in the air.

  Hollister sat bolt upright. That meant that no one on the Vietnamese side could have known about his ambush patrol early enough to tip off the VC what they had heard on the stream. But right after the ARVNs knew the patrol’s position, the stream traffic had stopped. He let it all cook in his head while he watched the stream below and the unmoving hands on his watch.

  The faces looked even grimmer by the next morning. The humor was gone. The smiles were missing. The patrol was bone tired.

  Hollister looked up for the shafts of sunlight. There were none. Low-hanging clouds were hugging the treetops. The dampness was chilling. He stretched and drafted a message in his notebook. He had lots to say and wanted to do it in the fewest words possible. He rewrote the words several times. Then it started raining.

  A couple of groans were just barely audible. Hollister was the only one who was pleased that it was raining. The noise from the rain patting, plopping, and hissing on the leaves would cover his voice a little and reduce its travel. He moved over to Theodore and picked up the handset.

  Theodore stopped him. He held up a finger to let Hollister know to wait one, then took off his floppy hat and placed it tightly over the tension clasp on one side of the battery case. Silently, Theodore unfastened it and then did the same on the other side, muffling the clasp. He slipped the battery out of the bottom of the PRC-25 and quickly replaced it with a fresh one. After he reclosed the clasps with the same attention to noise discipline, he sat back and smiled at Hollister. The radio was ready.

  Smiling back at Theodore, Hollister cupped his hat and his hand around the mouthpiece of the handset and balanced his notebook on his knee. “Quarterback Six, this is Two-six. Over.”

  He waited for a radio operator to reply. But Michaelson’s voice came back to him first try.

  “Six, Two-six. Important you do the following. Will explain later. One: Execute fake extraction at a nearby alternate PZ today. Two: Send word to the little people that we are out of AO. Do not do same for their fire support. Will stay one more night. Convinced we have been compromised and are being avoided. How copy? Over.”

  There was a long pause, then Michaelson’s voice replied, “Two-six, this is Six. Good copy. I agree. Understand your request. Stay close to the horn. Will try it your way. Good hunting, Ranger. Out.”

  Hollister put down the handset and looked around the perimeter. Every man in the circle knew what was going on and was angry. No one said a word. They were with Hollister.

  CHAPTER 25

  THEY ALL WONDERED IF the rain was ever going to stop. Not a single man on the patrol was able to escape the drenching rain that had started just after sunrise. By noon the freak storm was still producing a steady downpour.

  While they were all miserable from the rain, their minds were not on their discomfort. Their concern focused on the impact the rain could have on the demolitions below their position. If the runoff swelled the stream enough, it would also fill it with more deadfall and debris that could dislodge the explosives under the waterline or pull part of the det cord loose and simply render the entire ambush worthless.

  Ignoring the rain, Hollister shifted over to the vantage point overlooking the stream and tried to gauge the impact of the swelling stream on the hidden demolitions.

  It was too early for him to see much. It would all depend on how long it rained. He turned around and looked up through the hole in the canopy for some indication of the weather. The low-hanging cloud layer didn’t seem to be moving and there were no breaks in any direction that he could see. He rolled over and waved across the perimeter to get Theodore’s attention.

  Theodore looked up.

  Hollister pointed at the sky, shrugged his shoulders in a questioning manner, and pantomimed making a radio call.

  Theodore understood. He grabbed the handset and called back to Operations for a weather check. They were able to tell him that the forecast was for the weather to break in mid-afternoon.

  He turned back to Hollister, gave a slicing motion across his throat and then tapped his watch before holding up enough fingers to indicate fifteen hundred hours. Then he flipped his open palm over twice to indicate “more or less.”

  The news didn’t encourage Hollister. He knew that he would have to check the demo before dark. He got up and crossed the perimeter to assemble a detail to go to the stream bank later in the day. Reaching Camacho’s position, he was amused to find the sergeant’s water-catchin
g contraption working well.

  Camacho had taken several large leaves and set them up in the bushes to catch rainwater and funnel it down, from leaf to leaf, until it finally dripped into his canteen.

  Both Camacho and Hollister knew the value of avoiding any more moves out of the perimeter than were absolutely necessary. Water was one of those necessities that justified the contraption that Camacho had put up.

  Using a scrap of soggy notebook paper, they wrote notes to each other about the demo below and the need for a recheck. There was no need to discuss Hollister’s suspicion that someone had let the word slip out of Province Headquarters that they were in the area.

  Around four the rain let up and the sounds of a fake helicopter pickup could be heard from the perimeter. Hollister grabbed the handset and listened to the radio traffic.

  Somewhere on the other side of the hill mass, Captain Shaw was making false transmissions while someone else was answering as Hollister’s patrol. As soon as the fake extraction was over, Shaw called back to Operations and announced that 2-6’s team was out and bound for the base camp.

  Hollister knew that in a matter of minutes someone from Operations would drive an updated overlay over to the Province Headquarters that would show that his team had been extracted.

  It was iffy, and could increase the danger of them being hit by ARVN troops or fire support because they weren’t there—at least not on paper. But Hollister was confident that the ARVNs would not mount any operation in the area during the time they had remaining on the ground. That left artillery as the major threat. Since he had suggested Michaelson not send the changes to the fire support staff of the Province Headquarters, he was equally confident that the Operations staffers wouldn’t be in any hurry to coordinate the changes they had received with the Fire Support staff. So every artillery unit responsive to Province would still think there were friendlies on the ground.