by J. M. Graham
Bits and pieces of plants filled the air like a green dust storm, and bullets sounded like demented mosquitoes as they ripped through the jungle to spend their energies against the trees or lose their momentum far beyond the last fire team in the platoon. Deacon found himself buried in the foliage on the high side of the trail, wanting to move but afraid that the slightest twitch would shake the leaves above him and draw fire. He could see the new guy on the low side of the trail darting wild looks and jerking physically with every blast as though being struck with an electric cattle prod.
Everyone knew that the VC fire was coming head-on, making the air above the path a very dangerous place, but the remembered gravel-voiced screams of DIs from Parris Island to Pendleton pounding in the importance of fire superiority. You didn’t assume control of the battlefield, you took it—and you took it by force. Whatever advantage the enemy grabbed, you grabbed it back, and made him pay a high price for his audacity.
Burke raised himself on his elbows and fired a full magazine over the sprawled Marines ahead of him. He wasn’t sure of a target, only a direction, but apparently his newly bestowed authority brought with it a responsibility to act. To his surprise, he found that he was the kind of squad leader who led by example. He ejected the empty magazine and slapped in a fresh one as the firing ahead stopped. The jungle went silent. The air seemed to vibrate with the quiet. Ahead Burke could see Karns on his back in the middle of the path, arms spread, coughing a geyser of blood. He looked back at the empty ground behind him. “Corpsman up,” he screamed. He could hear the lieutenant’s voice barking orders, and then the entire platoon opened fire.
Lieutenant Diehl was less than a month away from rotating to a new assignment in the rear. He’d spent enough time in the bush to feel he deserved to coast awhile in an area that offered a little more security than a flak jacket and good aim gave him. He wouldn’t miss being in the field, but he wouldn’t change anything either—especially now. The VC firing stopped as though killed by a command, and the silence rang in his ears and teased the dark corners of his experience. He saw the pattern develop as though it were a tangible entity he could reach out and touch; and he knew he had to touch it on the high ground, and fast. One of the gun teams was strung out just behind him, and he called out to the gunner. “Direct fire uphill! Now!” he said with enough force to leave no question about the urgency.
The gunner unfolded his lanky frame, rolled onto his knees, sat back on his heels, and raised the M60. Fifty rounds hung over the C-rat can wired to the side of the M60, keeping the angle of feed honest so the gun could be fired single-handed without it jamming. He clamped the butt stock under his arm and pulled the trigger. Black links dragged the brass cartridges over the can as the muzzle blast jolted the foliage into frantic spasms. He swung the barrel up and forward, covering the ground above the line of Marines ahead of him. He held the trigger down, making his feed man jump to get another hundred rounds from the bandoleer around his neck to the belt vanishing into the chattering receiver.
The third man in the M60 team had the gun’s extra barrel in a soft bag slung over his shoulder. He glanced nervously at the gunner. It was his job to remind him to fire short bursts and save the barrel. A cyclic rate of 550 rounds per minute and a determined trigger finger could fry a barrel in short order, and it was never fun to change one under fire; your concentration always seemed to be needed elsewhere. He raised his M16 and ripped a full magazine into the high side of the mountain.
From behind, the M79 fired, sending the fat explosive rounds up onto the mountainside as fast as fingers could break the breech and reload the chamber. The muzzle ponk and pause ended in a sudden blast hidden in the trees. As the second 40-mm round detonated high up the slope, the mountainside erupted in a storm of firing, sending the Marines pitching back down onto their faces.
As was often the case when the firing began, the only targets moving were the corpsmen. When Burke used the eerie silence to call for help, Doc Garver was already crawling forward, a demo bag full of battle dressings hanging from his neck and his compartmented medical bag dragging along the ground, the strap wrapped around his right hand. He climbed over prone Marines in the path. Those with room squeezed aside while firing to give him room to pass. He was just starting to get to his feet when the mountain burst open again, raining lead down on their position and sending him headfirst to the ground. He landed next to a Marine who was lying on his back and trying to get two LAAW rocket launcher straps from his neck. The tubular launchers always snagged on vines and branches, and when you went to ground they always managed to get in the way. The Marine seemed especially agitated. “Doc,” he said.
Doc Garver spit out a bit of the muddy path. “I’m busy, Bishop,” he said, getting ready to start crawling again.
“Take a look at this,” Bishop said, pulling his left pant leg up to the knee. A dark hole in the inside of the calf led to a gaping red mouth on the outside where a round had split the muscle and flesh on exiting.
The doc wiped his mud-caked hand on the side of his pants and felt the Marine’s shin from knee to ankle. “Tibia’s good,” he said.
The Marine assumed that was a good sign and finally got the tangled LAAWs free, setting them at his side.
Garver unsnapped a compartment on one of his bags that held small bits of shiny metal. He scooped out two safety pins and thumbed the tines open. “You ready?” He said.
“Ready for what?”
Garver hooked the pink edge of the gaping wound with the pin’s point and, squeezing the flesh together, skewered the opposite side and locked the pin closed.
“Shit, Doc,” Bishop whispered through clenched teeth.
Garver pushed the second pin through the puckered skin like hooking a worm. He pulled a battle dressing from the bag and tore the sterile plastic wrapping open. The pad had a pinkish hue, and the four gauze leads, meant to encircle anything from a leg to a torso, seemed excessively long. The doc folded the bandage around Bishop’s calf. Instead of cutting them, he crossed the filmy tails and wrapped them tightly, again and again, until their length was used up. He could hear Burke calling up ahead. The distant and frantic voice cut through spaces in the noise. “I gotta go. Tie these in a knot over the outside of your leg.” He handed the loose ends over so they wouldn’t unravel.
“Hey, Doc. Do you think they’ll send me home?” Bishop said, sounding like a youngster on a department store Santa’s lap asking for a pony but uncertain whether the tired guy in red could deliver the goods.
Doc Garver turned away and started crawling again. “Tie it tight,” he said over his shoulder.
Firing from both sides shredded the lush green vegetation of the Ong Thu. Wildly aimed projectiles punched through everything in their way, and patches of the mountain shuddered under the impact of M79 rounds. The muzzle blasts of dozens of weapons reverberated against the canopy ceiling like thunderous echoes in a drill hall. Instinct dictated that the only position that provided even the illusion of safety was flat on the ground. And if you could burrow, you burrowed.
The incoming rounds kept Doc Garver low. He slithered on his belly like a snake, trying to pull himself forward without raising anything up that could be shot off. Bits and chunks of plants landed on his back, and the gunfire from the Marines he passed set his ears ringing into temporary deafness. Pieces of the path jumped into the air ahead of him as the strikes of a line of bullets skipped across. He stopped, staring at the unsettled ground. He didn’t subscribe to the theory of lightning never striking twice in the same place, and the chewed ground he would have to cross made him feel irrationally vulnerable. When his body scraped over the churned earth, he squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath, steeling his body for the impact of another stream of rounds and hoping he would take the pain of being hit with a stoicism that would do him credit; but he passed by with nothing more than frazzled nerves. Ahead, he could see Burke waving an arm, as if hand signals would get him there faster. He dug in his elbows and
toes and inched forward as fast as he could go.
In front of Burke, a pair of legs jutted from the bush. Jungle boots with the toes scuffed to tan pointed awkwardly at the canopy high above. The corpsman looked into the little alcove made by the crush of the falling body and saw a green towel draped over a face, but instead of being supported by facial features, the towel sank into a red crater. He started to reach for the limp wrist, but Burke tossed a spent cartridge brass to get his attention and pointed forward to where Karns lay in the path, his back arched over his pack.
“He’s dead, Doc,” Burke yelled, his face inches from the ground. “See what you can do for Karns.”
The corpsman reluctantly pulled away from the body. It was his job to determine if someone was dead or not, entrenched in the description of his MOS, and he didn’t like having it usurped by anyone but Brede. On the other hand, some deaths didn’t require a studied opinion. Gruesomely fatal damage was as obvious to the layman as anyone else, and he was sure Burke was right. He moved on until he reached Karns’ head. Fragile red air bubbles rose above faint breaths and fed streaks of blood that made tracks down into Karns’ ears. His arms were spread wide and his feet were together as though he was awaiting crucifixion. His flak jacket hung open, and Garver could see the dark hole in the left side of his chest percolating gouts of bright blood.
Garver moved his face close to the Marine’s ear. “Karns,” he said. “Karns.” But whatever life force the Marine had left wasn’t being wasted on hearing. Doc Garver pulled out an empty plastic wrapper from a battle dressing and cut it in two with his KA-BAR, found his widest roll of adhesive bandage, and taped the wrapper over the chest hole. Bright red oxygenated blood smeared against the plastic. His shaky fingers fumbled for a pulse at the Marine’s neck, but he couldn’t tell if the beat he felt belonged to Karns or was just his own charged system pounding in his fingers.
The platoon’s position went no further than the mud caked into the worn tread of Karns’ boots, and the doc shot apprehensive glances at the shadows in the virgin green jungle ahead of him while freeing the buckles on Karns’ pack straps. Once they were loose, he rolled Karns to the left, wounded side down, and pulled up the back of his flak jacket. Another red hole fit neatly between a pair of ribs, and he used the other half of the battle-dressing wrapper to seal the leak. Blood made a sticky pool where Karns’ face caressed the path.
Burke and Deacon fired full magazines into the mountainside, and Garver flinched from the assault on his already overcharged nervous system, but the noise had no effect on Karns. The doc squirmed around until he could see the Marine’s face, eyes half closed, unseeing, thin streams of blood dripping from both nose and mouth. Stinging sweat burned the corpsman’s eyes, and he wiped it away with the back of a bloodstained hand, leaving dark streaks across his forehead. His hand shook. An involuntary mantra ran through his mind: stay cool, stay cool, stay cool.
Behind Garver the voices of squad and fire team leaders were cutting through the gunfire, directing their people to concentrate all their efforts on the upper slope. The telltale flash of a LAAW launcher sent a rocket into the trees that shook the ground with its blast. The doc thought he heard the muffled explosion of a hand grenade and wondered to himself what crazy bastard threw a grenade in this dense foliage when the odds of it getting caught up in the branches and falling back on you instead of hitting the enemy were even money.
Karns’ breaths were shallow and short, and his color was more gray than tan. Even the bulldog tattoo on his arm seemed dull and colorless to Garver, and he dug into the three-tiered pouch that hung from his web belt next to his .45 automatic. The two top tiers held bottles of serum albumen; the bottom contained a Kodak Instamatic camera wrapped in plastic. He withdrew a bottle and stopped to look at Karns again. With Brede off with Sergeant Blackwell and Middleton’s squad, he only had the two bottles of serum for the rest of the platoon, and he couldn’t guess what injuries he would face before this little gift from the Arizona was over. What he did know was that Karns did not look good. It was quite possible that Karns would not survive such wounds even if he were hit while lying on a treatment table at the aid station in An Hoa.
Doc Garver hated the awful decisions of triage in the field, the tyranny of priorities. Who was too far gone to receive live-saving aid? Who, being so damaged, was a waste of vital medical supplies? Though Karns was a long shot, he had to try.
He could see Burke screaming at his squad to slow their rate of fire before their ammunition was exhausted. An M16 lay barrel-down in the brush where it had dropped from Karns’ unconscious hand. The doc kicked the sole of Burke’s boot and pointed at the rifle. Burke tossed it over impatiently, as though angry that his concentration was broken, but he looked back to see if the corpsman intended to exact a little revenge of his own or just needed a twenty-round security blanket. The doc pulled the magazine free and ejected the round from the chamber, then tossed them to Burke. The new squad leader nodded his thanks and turned away. It was better not to dwell on a fallen Marine or what it took to keep him alive lest you begin to see it as prophecy. Turn away and leave the wounds to the corpsman. What you don’t see won’t fill your mind’s eye and become an unconscious guide to your every movement.
Doc Garver fished Karns’ bayonet from the scabbard on his belt and snapped it under the barrel of the M16, driving it into the rich earth. The butt stock wavered over Karns’ head, and the doc hung the bottle of serum albumen from the trigger guard. He unraveled the plastic tubing and, with shaking fingers, searched the inside of Karns’ left arm for a target vein. The skin was as pale as the underbelly of a fish. Intravenous injection had never been Garver’s strong suit. Even during his year at the naval hospital at the Great Lakes Naval Base he often had to enlist the help of a more experienced hand to find a successful way into a patient’s bloodstream, and this with veins that weren’t in the process of collapse. His mind raced to remember the lectures on the “cut down” when it was necessary to open the flesh above the target artery. He hoped he wouldn’t have to dig with a scalpel in this place. After three probes came up empty, he plunged the barrel of the beveled needle in and sighed in relief as blood infiltrated the tubing. He reached up and let the liquid flow free.
The intensity of the fire coming from the high ground seemed to be diminishing. Rounds were still slapping through the branches, but from fewer sources. The lieutenant’s voice cut through the machine-gunner’s heavy trigger finger, and the M60 shifted to bursts that had ends. Burke sent Laney and Deacon forward past where the doc leaned over Karns.
The acrid smell of burned cordite hung in the air and mixed with the odor of shredded plants and the pungent wafts of churned earth. The gush of enemy fire slowed to a trickle, and the Marines knew that the VC were holding true to form. They would hit from invisible positions then fade into the jungle, leaving nothing behind but spent brass—and more often than not, not even the brass.
Lieutenant Diehl already had fire teams leapfrogging up the mountain. The incoming rounds petered out until the only sound was the alternating fire of M16s covering the fire teams on the move. There was no doubt that they were advancing on abandoned positions. With luck they would find dead or wounded with their weapons, but generally that happened only when the Marines designed the surprises. But the VC were running the game plan here, and everyone knew that their plans always included an exit strategy.
Burke stepped around Doc Garver and moved Laney and Deacon into positions that could cover the point while Bishop hobbled up using his M16 as a crutch. The tails of the battle dressing on his leg hung from his cuff like drab pennants. He gave a questioning nod at Karns’ limp body and got a hopeless shrug from the corpsman, then turned his face away to the tortured slope of the Ong Thu where his fellow Marines were in pursuit of ghosts.
The formation of H-34s flew an awkward path over the valley beyond the Thu Bon, their tails slaloming in the turbulence. Corporal Pusic was crushed up against the grunts crowded into the
last bird. His shoulders were crammed against those of the men on either side, and his knees were pulled up against his chest, with Sergeant Litinsky’s pack pushing against his shins. Vibrations from the big engine passed from the deck up through the occupants, who passed them along to one another in an impossibly rapid Morse code, an ominous message being shared by osmosis. The helicopter’s interior was infused with the odor of oil and fuel, and even the air currents from the rotors couldn’t rid the heavy atmosphere of the musty warehouse stink of web and canvas gear. And overlaying that Pusic could detect the sweet aroma of gun oil on freshly cleaned weapons.
Some faces looked in his direction with suspicion, but concerns of their own quickly drew them away. The Marine leaning into Corporal Pusic’s left shoulder looked him over from his Kiwi-blackened boots to the bright camo cover on his helmet. The man’s own boots were scuffed and worn and had holes at the ankles. His utilities were faded, and his tattered helmet cover showed burnished steel through holes around the rim. Both men were part of the Corps, but from different worlds within it, and that difference made Pusic uncomfortable. The Marine held his thumb up and smiled around a wad of brown chew. “Get some,” he said, as though he thought the clean corporal was satisfying his curiosity, going on some wild outing of his own choosing. Pusic tried to smile, but his heart wasn’t in it.
The first helicopter lowered its tail and bounced to a stop fifty yards from the crash site, and Marines gushed from the side like blood from a burst artery. They jumped from the starboard opening so quickly that they risked landing on those who had exited ahead, as though they were anxious to get out into the rain. They spread out and ran hunched over toward the downed helicopter—not because they had an overwhelming desire to join the squad closing on the crash but because the sight of the big, awkward 34s jockeying for position on the valley floor would draw fire like magnets if any hostiles were nearby, and the smart move was to get as far away as possible. You ducked down in case the machine took a hit large enough to change the rotational plane of the big rotors enough for a jolted blade to cleave you in half, and you kept moving away until you couldn’t feel the swirling turbulence on your back. The pilots knew they were the object of every enemy gunner’s eye, too, and the instant the crew chief announced that the last grunt had cleared the deck, the engine would roar and the machine would lift and bank away, dipping its nose, swinging its tail, and heading for high air.
