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

by Dennis Foley

  “No, just bills. No shortage on bills.”

  Chapter 2

  THE GROUND INSIDE THE tree line was damp, rocky, and very cold. A low fog was rolling in from all directions and forming a thin layer of smokelike haze that started about three feet off the open field in front of Bui and cleared at no more than thirty feet above that.

  Bui knew that if the fog continued to thicken it would conceal most of his five-foot frame from sight, but not his legs and feet. And when it came time for him to hug the ground for protection, he would actually be exposing himself more than he would by standing.

  He tried to resist the shivering that was seizing control of his body. As much as he didn’t want to go through with the probing attack that lay before them, he almost wished it would get started so he could enjoy the warmth that would accompany the action.

  He had never wanted to be a soldier, much less a sapper. He knew that the sapper’s was the most dangerous of jobs even before he was sent to the unit. In the months he had been at it, he had been involved in four probing attacks, an ambush, and many nighttime mine-emplacing patrols. What made it even worse for him was that he never even had an important job. He would either have the duty to watch out for Americans or South Vietnamese while the others did all the critical work, or he would be used as a pack animal to carry loads of ammunition, explosives, or crude engineering equipment.

  The ground just under his nose smelled like the dirt in his home village near Dong Ba Tinh. It seemed as if he had been gone for years, but it had been less than one since the VC cadre had come to his hamlet and yanked him from the tiny classroom where he had been teaching farmers’ children for two years.

  He missed the children. Even the naughty ones. He missed his family and the warmth of their small home. He even missed his chores. Since he had been drafted by the Viet Cong, his aging father had had to do more work than one man could do. A chill went through him as he let himself wonder if his family was even alive. He had heard stories of battles in his district. He had seen such battle sites in other places and often wondered how anyone could live through the hell that took place in what had been peaceful villages.

  The tap on his calf gave the signal that they were moving out. He looked up to see that the fog had thinned a bit and was more wispy than before. It was the first time he had seen the outpost. It was a small compound on the edge of Tay Ninh that was supposed to protect the highway that entered the town on the far side of the camp. It was about a hundred yards wide as he could see it, and he knew it was shaped like an equilateral triangle from the dirt, string, and stick model he had seen earlier in the day.

  His squad leader had made a scale model of the outpost in the assembly area where they waited for night. The model allowed each of them to get familiar with the layout and to understand what was expected of him without having to see the outpost first. Seeing it now, he thought the model had been remarkably accurate.

  His job was to carry two pole charges for the others and to use them if needed. He had practiced with the pole charges in a small training area on the Cambodian border. He had never done it for real. But in theory the pole charge was simply a long bamboo pole with an explosive charge tied to one end of it. In use, a sapper would crawl up to an enemy bunker, ignite the fuse, and spear the charge through the bunker’s small firing aperture, hoping to be able to time his actions so it would go off after he got clear of the blast and before the bunker’s occupants could react and disarm the explosives.

  The pole gave the sapper a greater chance of protecting himself, as he would not have to get as close to the aperture as he would trying to hurl a satchel charge through it.

  The gravel and rice stubble hurt the skin on Bui’s knees and elbows. Mud was collecting under the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and his grip was slippery on the two pole charges that he tried to lift and slide across the ground. To make matters even worse, the flimsy sling had broken on the antique SKS rifle he carried. Retying the sling made it much shorter so the slung rifle dug into his shoulder blades and the sling cut across his neck and chest with each movement toward the South Vietnamese outpost.

  From ground level the corner guard towers were frightening. Bui kept looking up at them through the fog. He could just make out their outline against the white blanket. But it was too dark to tell if the guards were at their machine guns and paying attention to the no-man’s-land that Bui and the six others were crossing on their bellies.

  As they got closer to the South Vietnamese barbed wire, Bui could hear the sounds of a radio tuned to a Vietnamese station. The voice was high-pitched and excited as it described the current successes of Thieu’s forces somewhere that Bui didn’t catch over the sound of his own breathing and the muzzle of his rifle clanking against a rock.

  He instinctively stopped to try to determine if anyone had heard the noise. It was an unforgivable sin, and he was sure that if he lived through the attack he would be punished for sloppy movement. He looked over to his right and met the angry gaze of his squad leader, who said much with his eyes.

  After adjusting his rifle so that it rode farther down on his back, Bui took another grip on the poles and edged forward. In a few more yards he came to the double-apron barbed wire, but it was too close to the ground for him to be able to slip under it. Resigning himself to the task, he reached into his pack and pulled out a small square cut from an American USAID rice bag and a pair of rusted wire cutters. He unslung his rifle and rolled over onto his back.

  Before continuing, he looked to his left and right to check on the others’ progress. He could only see two comrades on one side and his squad leader in the other direction. They too had encountered the barbed wire, but were able to slip under it at low spots in the ground, and one of them was trying to prop a stick up under the bottom strand to give him room to slip through.

  Moving laterally—to one of the other spots—would be more dangerous than cutting his way through, so Bui wrapped the cloth around the wire and slipped the jaws of the wire cutters over it. Careful not to jerk the wire, he squeezed down on the cutters’ handles. Nothing happened. His strength had been so drained by the cold he was unable to cut through the wire and the cloth.

  He looked at the others to see if they had spotted his failure. They were busy with their own sections of the wire. Bui reached up and tried to sever the wire with the cutters. He finally heard the wire give under the muffling of the cloth covering. But just as quickly he heard a terribly disturbing sound. Somewhere on the length of wire there was an empty tin can with pebbles in it. Shaking the wire caused the can to whip violently, making a loud racket as the rocks rattled in it.

  Almost without a pause, the sound of the simple alarm was replaced by that from the converging fires of the two water-cooled .30 caliber machine guns in the towers. Tracers flew from two other points between the towers—the bunkers he and his comrades were to attack with the pole charges.

  Bui’s initial response was to grab for his rifle and roll into a ball. He clutched the rifle and dragged it to his torso, scooping up large gobs of wet dirt with the rear sights and the muzzle. As he tried to clear the mud from the sights, the machine guns were joined by small-arms fire from more riflemen alerted by the initial firing. A hand flare whooshed out of the camp and arced over the sappers—illuminating them spread out outside the wire, hugging the ground.

  The shrill sound of a whistle cut through the din. The signal to retreat! Bui was sure of it. He spun on his stomach, deciding to leave the pole charges, and scrambled back to the tree line they had left only minutes before. The flare went out in seconds, and the only light in the night was from the muzzle flashes of the weapons shooting from the compound and the tracers.

  He got to his feet and tried to stay crouched over to avoid the tracers zipping past him on both sides and over his head. His footing was faulty, the ground turned to slime in his path, and his focus was distorted by his panic. His heart pounded as he slipped and fell twice trying to get to the trees.r />
  The firing from the camp picked up, and the ground around Bui began to pop with impacting rifle bullets. He was sure that the hundred more yards to the tree line were beyond his reach as he ran, fell, got up, and ran, only to fall again.

  Suddenly, he heard the distinctive thunks of mortar rounds leaving their tubes inside the compound. Before the first round landed there was a frightening white light that filled the night. It was accompanied by a blast of heat on his back and a feeling that someone had shoved him. He was hurled forward, lost his balance, and fell once again as he recognized that someone in the camp had detonated the fougasse that was buried inside the wire. Fougasse was thickened gasoline that was stored underground in drums and fused to detonate in order to break up a ground attack.

  As quickly as Bui realized he was outside the effective fan of the fougasse, the first of three mortar rounds landed. Two were far enough away for him not to have to worry about, and the third one he never heard.

  His hand shook with pain as he dug at the piece of shrapnel in his calf with a small piece of bamboo. The two-inch piece of metal was imbedded in his lower leg, with only the smallest piece of one end of it visible through the blood-gorged wound it had made on entry.

  He knew he had to endure the pain and get the mortar shard out of his leg if he wanted any chance of surviving the wound. There were no alternatives, no medics like the Americans had, no hospitals nearby, and certainly no medevac choppers.

  Life in Tay Ninh Province was at once civilized and punishing. Within sight in almost every cardinal direction Bui could see huts, hamlets, motorbikes, pickup trucks, and an endless stream of olive drab military vehicles that belonged to the American and South Vietnamese armies. Still, none of these signs of civilization could be of any help to him unless his squad leader, Sergeant Thanh, wished to approach a farmer, a peddler, or a driver to ask for assistance.

  Bui knew he would risk the safety of his squad if they moved out of the thicket that concealed them from view. His wound was serious, but not yet life-threatening. As such, it was up to him to try to treat his own wound and not be a burden or make demands that would compromise his comrades.

  The bamboo stick chewed up undamaged flesh as he dug its ragged end deeper in an attempt to get it under the fragment. He hoped to be able to wedge the stick under the jagged metal and by pressing down on the other end, using his upper leg as a fulcrum, force the metal out of the wound in the opposite direction from its entry path.

  His leg started to shake violently, the pain causing him to lose control of the muscles. He knew that he had to work faster or the pain and the loss of control would cause him to do even more damage and fail at removing the metal.

  “What are you doing? You are stupid, Bui! You should have died. Instead you slow us down, and you leave a trail of blood that any republican recruit could follow. Move your hand!” Sergeant Thanh said, disgust in his voice.

  “But, Comrade Thanh, I must clean this wound and dress it or—”

  Thanh waved for Bui to shut up, then slapped his hand and the stick away.

  Unsure of what he was about to do, Bui watched Thanh for a sign. Thanh looked up, jerked his head to summon another soldier, and reached into the ratty satchel that hung diagonally across his body by a piece of hemp rope.

  “You call out and I will make you wish the mortar had killed you. Now, look away.” Thanh waited for Bui to turn his head and then looked up at Comrade Anh and nodded for him to restrain Bui. Words were not necessary.

  Bui, lying on his stomach, grabbed the base of two small trees with his hands and gritted his teeth as he supported his weight on his hip and his elbows—his wounded leg outstretched to his rear.

  From the satchel Thanh pulled out an aging straight razor that he had carried since his father had given it to him. It had been his father’s father’s. He flipped it open with one thumb and took a grip on the fractured mother-of-pearl handle. With his other hand he brushed his leathered thumb across the edge to test it for sharpness. It was anything but sharp, as Thanh found out. The edge had corroded since he had dry-shaved the few whiskers he had on his chin before they began the three-day march.

  He quickly unslung his submachine gun and turned the leather sling out to strop the blade a few times, more for effect than for sharpness. His eyes wandered from the blade to the wound and to Bui’s back. Bui was still, muscles tensed. A bead of sweat forming between his shoulder blades rolled down to the waistband of his tattered shorts.

  Without warning, Thanh traced the length of the shrapnel imbedded in Bui’s leg and parted the skin above it, revealing the entire shell fragment.

  The sounds that came from Bui’s throat were breathy and guttural as he endured the pain—as near to silence as possible.

  Thanh deftly folded the razor, cupped it in the palm of his hand, and stuck his index finger into the enlarged slit and under the fragment, popping it out onto the ground in one move.

  Bui flinched in pain but remained silent, hearing the metal thunk onto the packed earth below his leg.

  Thanh mumbled something about Bui’s poor performance and left Anh to finish attending to Bui’s leg.

  “Why does he single me out?” Bui asked.

  Pouring water from his battered tin canteen into the open wound to flush it out, Anh looked up at Bui and shrugged. “You make trouble for him. He says, all the time, that you are a bad soldier and that you are disloyal to the Front.”

  “But I am a bad soldier. I am a teacher, not a warrior. I am a scholar, not a fighter.”

  “Don’t speak. You will make things worse,” Anh said as he unwrapped a fishing line stored around the muzzle of his rifle. He poured more water on the rusted fishhook that had been made out of a piece of wire and stretched the line to remove the kinks and curls. “Sit quietly. I have to do this, or you will bleed until you die.”

  Bui knew that the pain of the hook’s point would be very uncomfortable, but nothing compared to the cutting that Thanh had just finished. He took two deep breaths and let the last one out slowly. “Begin. Do a good job. I don’t want an ugly scar.”

  Laughing briefly at the comment, Anh pinched the edges of the wound together and began to sew them closed with the fishing line. “How can you talk of a scar when you could have died from that fragment had it hit you in the stomach or head. You are lucky, but you are a stupid man, Bui.”

  Taking the opportunity to talk instead of just focusing on the pain of the field suturing, Bui challenged Anh. “Why am I so stupid? Because I don’t want to be here? Because I am just now twenty-two and want to go home to teach my students?” He paused and lowered his voice even more. “Because I hate this war?”

  “Quiet. You will make trouble for all of us.”

  Anh was right. Any complaining was taken as a sign of disloyalty and a lack of self-discipline by the political cadre. It could not be overheard and overlooked by them. They would surely find out about his grumbling and punish him. But at that moment, Bui just didn’t care.

  After two days of walking on the wounded leg, Bui was concerned that the pain was getting worse instead of better and it looked worse, too. The entire area was swollen; the edges of the wound were pressed together by the tightly stretched fishing line, but the margins were still oozing muddy colored fluids that kept the area wet all the time. Bui had decided to quit worrying about the wound since there was little he could do as they tried to move back to their base area in the northern Hau Nghia Province.

  Movement was hampered by the increasing presence of the American choppers that had started crisscrossing the skies over the flat paddy fields. Their path was restricted to zigzagging along right-angle dikes that were the only ribbons of vegetation tall and thick enough to conceal the ten-man patrol with which Bui was traveling.

  Sergeant Thanh came back to the thicket where the others waited to tell them that their course was clear and that they could move forward without fear of being jumped by a South Viet or American ambush. “We will wait until afte
r dark to move to the tunnels because there is too much open ground to cross in the daylight. We will stay here for now. Eat, get some rest, but stay alert. There are too many republican spies here. If they see us we may never get to the safety of the tunnels.”

  The announcement was just what Bui wanted to hear. He was eager to get into the tunnels for some rest, some release from the constant vigilance of being on patrol, and to see some of his friends. But he needed to rest his leg. He feared holding up the others if they decided to move in the daylight. It would mean moving quickly to reduce their exposure and the amount of time they were visible to farmers and other civilians who might give away their position and destination to the South Vietnamese forces. Moving like that would mean they would change their course to move as if going in another direction in order not to telegraph the general location of their tunnel entrance—ultimately making the move a longer one.

  At night, they would be able to slip across the open paddies under the cover of darkness—with little fear of being discovered or reported. He would rest up and hope to reclaim some of his energy for the night move. When Thanh did not issue any other instructions, Bui assumed he had time to eat and try to tend his wound.

  He wasn’t sure if it was doing any good medically, but Bui took one of the small stones they had used to support the aluminum pot they cooked their rice in to relieve some of his pain. The rock stayed warm for a long time, and Bui wrapped it in a scrap of dirty cloth he had salvaged from a dead villager whom they had come across that morning.

  Bui wasn’t exactly sure how the villager had been killed. It could have been from a booby trap or an unlucky artillery round, or he might have been carrying some kind of explosive. But whatever it was, the old man had lost his arms, most of the front of his face, and his upper chest to some violent explosion. He had been carrying a small woven basket with hemp shoulder straps. Inside the basket were some mud-covered bulbs, manioc roots, and the rag he had used to wrap up his small hand hoe to keep it from gouging the contents of the basket.