by Dennis Foley
Hollister grabbed the handset of his radio and yelled into the mouthpiece, “Heads up! I just marked the location with yellow smoke. Anybody got it? The fire came from a point two-five meters north of the marker. Over.”
At the same moment the inside of the chopper became a cacophony of noise as the door gunners opened up with all they had on the ground north of the yellow smoke. And Iron Mike’s gunships abruptly changed their direction.
Mike spoke up. “Roger, Two-six. We’re gonna make a grease spot out of the target area.”
Hollister remembered that they had been hit, and looked around the inside of the chopper for any damage. The air was still filled with the sounds of machine-gun fire and LRPs firing at the spot on the ground that was quickly getting behind them.
He looked up to see how the co-pilot was. He didn’t need to check. The young warrant officer’s helmet had an exit hole about the size of a tennis ball behind the left ear. Hollister fought the urge to vomit. It was Patterson, the warrant officer who had flown right seat on the first insert that Hollister had honchoed.
Everyone in the chopper stopped shooting as soon as they realized that they were too far away from the smoke marker and that their rounds might jeopardize the gunships rolling in behind and below them.
The door gunner nearest Hollister locked off his machine gun, reached over and tapped Hollister on the shoulder. Since Hollister didn’t have a helmet or headset on, the door gunner stuck his finger up inside his helmet and pulled the foam earpiece away from his ear in order to hear Hollister’s reply, and yelled, “Sir, we’re going to the Clearing Station first.”
Hollister knew that Patterson was dead, but understood that no one wanted to fly a chopper around with a dead man in the front seat. It was best that they take the co-pilot’s remains to Clearing first.
“Sure, don’t worry about us. I’ll get some ground transportation sent over,” Hollister yelled back. He knew that the crew would want to take Patterson in themselves and stay as long as was necessary to make sure that his remains were taken care of.
Sergeants Marrietta and Easy were waiting at the medevac pad with a deuce-and-a-half when the chopper landed. The medics ran up and helped the door gunner unstrap the dead pilot and get him onto a gurney. No one was willing to assume that he was really dead until they had him inside and a doctor made it official.
Hollister and the other LRPs waited until the pilot was through the door of the hospital Clearing Station before anyone moved to get in the truck. And no one spoke.
Hollister motioned to Camacho to load up the truck as he walked back around to the pilot, who was still shutting down the chopper. The pilot was Lieutenant Reitz. Hollister had ridden in his slick several times.
“Man, I’m sorry about your peter pilot. We were sure that the tracks were probably nothing.” The pain shot through Hollister’s stomach as his gut made one last grip against itself. “I guess I was wrong.”
Reitz opened the door, stepped out on the skid, and put his hand on Hollister’s shoulder. “Hey, we were wrong. It ain’t your fault. Okay? It happens. You know?”
As Hollister turned around, the second chopper, with the other half of his patrol and Prattler’s body, landed on a second medevac pad marker. As the team gently lifted Prattler’s body out onto the stretcher a medic had brought, Hollister and Easy headed toward the Clearing Station to take care of their fallen member.
Back in his hooch, Hollister dropped his gear, cleared his weapons, and poured himself a serious drink. The first taste of the scotch made his mouth burn, tightened his throat, and hit his stomach with a jolt. He didn’t care. He just wanted to take some of the feeling of despair out of his head.
He picked up the field phone and called Operations to see what time the debriefing would be held. Captain Michaelson was still out inserting and extracting teams and had sent back word to hold on Hollister’s debriefing until he returned.
Given the time, Hollister opted to have a second drink and get a shower in before Michaelson returned. He poured the drink on top of the remains of the first one and turned to his locker for a towel. He spotted the four letters on his cot.
Reaching to pick them up, he quickly saw that three of them were from Susan and one was from his mother. He felt guilty for being so far behind in his letter writing and for knowing that again he would not discuss the painful things like the deaths of Prather and the young warrant officer. He would think of some other way to fill the pages of his replies. But he resented having to do it.
Taking another long sip of his scotch, he felt the sudden alarm of his bowels revolting. The unmistakable urgency of diarrhea gave him only seconds to get to the latrine.
After the debriefing, Michaelson asked Hollister to come see him in his office. They had not discussed the issue with the Province Headquarters during the debriefing. Without saying so, both Michaelson and Hollister thought that any discussion would be a negative morale factor for the troops. They had enough problems without hearing that their officers had no confidence in the South Vietnamese’s ability to safeguard classified information.
“Here, you could use this,” Michaelson said as he handed Hollister a beer from the cooler in the orderly room.
Reaching for his demo knife, Hollister took the bottle of San Miguel and held it between his knees while he unfolded the bottle opener. He popped the top, snapped the knife closed and slipped it back into the webbed nylon carrier that was attached to the belt above his back pocket.
Captain Michaelson silently raised his beer in a mute toast. He put the bottle down on his desk and shuffled through some handwritten notes in front of him. “I need your input on this thing with Province. I want to lodge an official complaint about the poacher incident and the ambush last night. This shit is fuckin’ criminal!”
“Yessir. Where do you want me to start?”
“I want you to write up everything from the first coordination visit before the wood poaching thing through today,” Michaelson said as he shoved his pages toward Hollister. “Look over my notes and make sure I got my shit together.
“This is not going to go over well at Brigade, and I don’t want to give them any reason to buck it back—like errors in dates or times or names or whatever the fuck they can find.”
Hollister took the pages and tapped the bottom edges on his knee, straightening them up. He was uncharacteristically silent.
“Get it off your chest,” Michaelson said.
“I’m so pissed. I also feel like I’m the last one to get the picture. I’ve been in country for almost a goddamn year and I just now realized that I haven’t been involved in one damn operation where I felt we had the upper hand.
“Is it me? I feel like there’s a script being passed around the Vietnamese—on both sides—that we never get to see. It’s a loose plan for when they let us win a little, and lots of days when they fuck over us!” He took a long sip of his beer. On top of the scotch, he was feeling a little fortified in his indignation. “Tell me something, sir. Do we really have any fucking idea what’s going on?” He suddenly realized that it sounded as if he were accusing Michaelson of something, and started to soften the question. “I didn’t mean that you—”
Captain Michaelson raised the palm of his hand to stop Hollister from apologizing. “I got a couple of years here. We aren’t running this show. In my opinion there are too damn many folks involved. Sure, we have a pretty good idea what’s going on out in Indian country. The problem is that everything we know, the ARVNs know, and that’s where it starts to come apart. It’s one of the reasons that I stay in outfits like this.”
Hollister looked at him, somewhat puzzled at the remark.
“You’ve been a platoon leader. Every step you took in the bush was leaked to every zipperhead from Hanoi to the U Minh Forest. Ever wonder why it was so long between contacts? Your best ones were chance contacts when some chopper pilot would catch the zips and Brigade would dump maneuver units on them. That’s when the game wasn’t sta
cked against you,” Michaelson said, a note of anger in his voice.
“That’s why staying out of the line units gives you a better chance of protecting your own and having a little more control,” Michaelson added.
Hollister looked at Michaelson and realized the futility of it all. He shook his head slightly as it sank in.
“It’s not what they teach at the War College or Leavenworth or Benning,” Michaelson said, “but you got to give away information over here like it has serial numbers on it. If you don’t watch your own ass, nobody else will.”
“But look at the hell it caused with that leg colonel from Province.”
“Don’t worry about him. If an ass chewing now and then is all it costs to keep from publishing our Op plans in the Saigon newspaper, then he can just bring a fuckin’ bib,” Michaelson said.
“But we can’t prove anything on this ambush. They’ll just claim that it was a coincidence or something,” Hollister said.
“Well, I’m not as interested in catching someone doing something wrong as I am stopping it from happening again. There’s a difference,” Michaelson said.
Hollister smiled and nodded his head. He remembered why he liked Michaelson. He was always putting the troops and the mission before personal wars or ego or revenge. He knew that he had to get his own emotions under control if he wanted to be half the soldier that Michaelson was.
He looked at the stack of envelopes sitting on his footlocker. He had written his parents, Susan, and Prather’s parents. And he had told half-truths to all of them.
Hollister took a long drink of scotch and lit another cigarette. He leaned back in his cot and let the smoke fill his lungs. It still felt like his first smoke since leaving for the ambush patrol, but the C-ration can filled with butts said otherwise. It made his head swim for a brief second.
He threw his cigarette lighter on the stack of letters and tried to rationalize all the lies in his head. How could he explain Prather’s death? The head shot on the pilot? The sampans blown into shreds of splintered wood? The ARVNs he couldn’t trust? None of it would make their lives any easier back in the World, and he couldn’t change what was happening in Vietnam. He swallowed the emotion with more scotch.
He considered having still another, but then looked at the notes Captain Michaelson had given him. He had put that off till last.
Reaching for the scotch bottle, Hollister got up from the cot and stepped toward the notes.
“Anybody home?”
He turned to find Easy standing outside his hooch.
“Come on in, First Sergeant. Pull up a drink and take a load off.”
Easy entered and waved a handful of papers at Hollister. In his other hand he held his personalized coffee cup with a splash of coffee still in the bottom. “It never stops. Now we have to submit friggin’ forms for press releases.”
“Press releases?”
“Each man has to fill out a form sayin’ yes or no to allowing his assignment here in Vietnam to be published in his hometown newspaper. Now ain’t that a crock? Even if the guy doesn’t want it in his hometown rag, he still has to sign a form saying so.”
Putting down the bottle, Hollister took the forms out of Easy’s hand and looked at them. “What does this have to do with me?”
Easy put his cup down and picked up the scotch bottle. He examined the label as if what it said would make any difference. “You got to fill one out on yerself and sign all the others for each man in the detachment.”
Hollister thumbed the stack of forms for size and groaned.
Easy unscrewed the top of the scotch bottle. “I’m sure the lieutenant understands that I’m only drinking this inferior brand of spirits to be hospitable. I’m partial to a more aged brand.”
Finding a pen, Hollister began signing the forms on his footlocker lid as Easy poured a couple of fingers of scotch into his mug.
“Please, sit down, Top. I’ll only be a minute with these.”
Easy pulled the chair out from the desk with his foot and straddled it. Crossing his arms over the back of the chair, he sat and sipped his scotch.
He watched Hollister rapidly scrawl his signature on form after form and laughed. “I’d like to have a buck for every lieutenant whose handwriting I’ve seen go to shit before he made captain. That’s what does it, you know. You sign your name enough times without a break and pretty soon you can’t even read whose it is. Guess that has its blessings, too.”
Signing the last one with an exaggerated flair, Hollister picked up the stack and handed it to Easy. “There you go, First Sergeant. Service with an Airborne smile.”
Easy took the pages and got to his feet. He killed the last of his scotch and looked down into the empty coffee mug.
“Why don’t you fix another one for the road, Top?” Hollister said, looking out the screen door toward the orderly room across the small compound. “Looks like it might be bad weather between here and there.”
Easy crouched down, looked out across the compound, and grunted in agreement. “Sure does look bad. Maybe the lieutenant’s right. Maybe a touch will steel me from the storm.” He poured another three fingers into the cup and raised one of his bushy eyebrows. “Hmmmm, I might have to revise my opinion of this brand.”
Hollister laughed. “I might have to find another bottle of that brand.”
Easy put the bottle down and spotted the addressed envelopes on the desk. “Would the lieutenant like me to take these over to the orderly room?”
“Yeah, that’d be great, Top. I’d appreciate it.”
The address on the top was one Hollister had gotten from Bernard earlier. It was the dead LRP’s family. “Prather’s people will appreciate the thought,” Easy remarked. “Hope it wasn’t too hard to write.”
“Never wrote one that wasn’t hard to write. I’d rather eat rocks,” Hollister said.
He watched Easy walk across the compound trying not to spill the scotch in his mug. The same ground fog that had closed in on the ambush site was crawling across the compound.
Hollister lit another cigarette and crushed the empty pack. As he spit a shred of tobacco from his mouth, he could see that the troop hooches were subdued. The normal marathon drinking and card playing sessions had been watered down by the two deaths. Hollister could see the outlines of clumps of soldiers sitting in the lights of the hooches drinking and talking quietly. He could hear the sounds of a portable radio over the distant sounds of artillery, choppers, and the ever-present drone of the generators spotted around the base camp.
Less than an hour later there was another knock at the door. Hollister looked up from the report. “Come.”
A new man from the first platoon entered carrying a hand grenade crate. “Ah, sir, I’m the CQ runner. The first sergeant sent me over with this.”
Not knowing what it was about, Hollister pointed the top of his ballpoint toward the corner. “Just put it down over there.”
The soldier straightened up, nodded, said good-night, and left before Hollister could thank him.
He tried to get back to the report, but the amount of drinking he had been doing fogged his thoughts, and curiosity about the grenade crate got to him.
He stepped over to the box and opened the lid. Inside, the box was filled with a few rolled-up sandbags that were cushioning a quart bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. There was a note written on a DA 1049 Disposition Form. It read: Was able to find resupply for your foul weather elixir. This might help any other NCOs visiting your hooch and will also ease some of the headaches that lieutenants get. Airborne!
It was unsigned.
Hollister had to shake his head at how far he and Easy had come since that first day on the airfield road. He certainly had changed his opinion of the crusty first soldier. He was a rock that Hollister could always count on—rough edges and all.
The pounding of his jungle boots against the roadway sent shock waves to Hollister’s aching head. The sun was too bright and the sound of the chanting soldiers aroun
d him was painful. To top off all the misery, the column of fours was returning from a three-mile run and he still hadn’t gotten his wind. He made himself another promise to cut down on his drinking and smoking. It was getting to be a regular thing with him—promising to get on some kind of health kick.
Michaelson and Hollister bumped into each other as they tried to catch their breath while walking around half bent over at the waist.
“Your people were excused from training. What’s it take to get you to sleep in?” Michaelson asked.
Hollister started to quote an old infantry adage. “More sweat on the training field—”
Michaelson raised his hand. “Spare me. But now that I look at you, you look like you could use a little heavy PT to get that rat piss out of your system. What’d you do last night—play too much poker with the troops?”
“I wish I had. It took me too many scotches to finish all the writing. I better just stay in the Infantry,” Hollister said.
“I won’t have time to look at it till midday. I’ve got a shitpot of things to do first. Why don’t you drop what you got off around lunchtime? And get some sleep.”
“Yessir—I got to square away my field gear first.”
“Go to it, Ranger,” Michaelson said.
Hollister saluted and picked up a double-time on the way back to his hooch.
Michaelson stood there watching him run away. Easy stepped up behind Michaelson. “He’s a good man, boss. He’s gonna be a good CO if he doesn’t wear himself out first.”
Michaelson looked over his shoulder at Easy. “He never lets up, does he?”
“No, sir. Reminds me of a young lieutenant I remember back at Bragg. You mighta known him—I think his name was Michaelson.”
Michaelson smiled at Easy. “You know, I can’t remember the last time I gave push-ups to a first sergeant.”
Not to be bested, Easy countered, “Maybe not, but I can remember when you did it to a dashing young three-striper back at Bragg.”
CHAPTER 26
