The Preserve
by Patrick Lestewka
Kindle Edition
Necro Publications
2011
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The Preserve © 2004 by Patrick Lestewka
Cover art © 2004 Erik Wilson
This digital edition March 2011 ©Necro Publications
Book design & typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Assistant editors:
Amanda Baird, John Everson, Jeff Funk, C. Dennis Moore
A Necro Publication
5139 Maxon Ter.
Sanford, FL 32771
www.necropublications.com
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DEDICATION:
To my Grandfather, Charles
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Thanks to Bob "Pegleg" Strauss and my father for their diligent editing, and to Dave Barnett for taking a chance.
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I was eighteen years old. And I was like your typical young American boy. A virgin. I had strong religious beliefs… My religious upbringing was, God was good. Everything good was what God wanted. Y’know, evil was the Devil’s way.
But evil didn’t enter it till Vietnam. I mean real evil. I wasn’t prepared for it at all…
It was all evil. All evil. I was all evil. Where before, I wasn’t. I look back, I look back today, and I’m horrified at what I turned into. What I was. What it did. I just look at it like it was somebody else. I really do.
It was somebody else.
— Unidentified Vietnam Veteran
Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathan Shay
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I.
Magnificent Seven
(1967)
War Zone D, South Vietnam
July 15th, 1967. 12:05 hours.
Flanked by a pair of Cobra gunships, the Huey banked around a broccoli-topped mountainside. A cool rotor wash blew through the open cab, tugging at the soldiers’ fatigues. Seven men were packed into the nylon mesh seats like so many lethal sardines: the Mobile Guerilla Force, A-303 Blackjack, the blackest of Black Ops units.
Or, as Top Brass dubbed them, the “Magnificent Seven.”
The Huey dropped to two hundred feet, into a valley between the green and purple mountain peaks. Triple-canopy jungle unfurled in five shades of green below the Huey’s armor-plated hull. The foliage broke and the chopper dropped into the Dong-Nai river basin, the river’s brown water scalloped by its whirring blades. The door gunner, all of eighteen, sat impassively behind his M60 machine gun. A pair of Wayfarer sunglasses set on the bridge of his nose reflected a doubled image of the noonday sun, twin fiery discs burning outwards from the smoked lenses. Sam the Sham’s voice pumped out of the cab speakers.
Lil’ Red Riding Hood, I don’t think little big girls should, Go walking in those spooky old woods alone…
The dustoff was two klicks off, an alternate pickup zone and hotter than a motherfuck. A 9th Infantry paratrooper unit on Long Range Patrol had been pinned in position by a patrolling platoon of heavily-armed NVA. The LuRPS had been taking heavy fire for hours, Charlie on them like stink on shit. Intel reported half the unit dead and a lot more wounded. Nobody knew if it was a job for Recon or Graves Registration.
The Blackjack insert team leader, Sergeant Jerome “Oddy” Grant, scanned the six faces staring back at him. He saw no fear or anxiety, only readiness.
Six men, aged nineteen to twenty-three. A year ago they’d been high school seniors and college sophomores and grainbelt farmhands, bank tellers and foundry workers. Two were married, three had steady girlfriends. Five children between them. Most had car loans and mortgage payments, performed volunteer work, attended church on Sundays. In a basement or rec room in six middle-class households scattered across America you would find walls hung with photographs of these men as swaddled infants and gap-toothed grade-schoolers, later as high school football slotbacks and basketball point guards. More recent snapshots show them as robed and mortarboard-bedecked college grads, or fathers dangling infants on their knees. In these same six houses lived the families who missed them, the mothers and fathers, wives and children who prayed nightly for the swift, safe return of their sons.
The pilot barked, “One minute to drop-off.”
The exercise was known as an out-and-in: Charlie knew there was going to be an extraction but wasn’t expecting an insertion on the same flight. The unit would drop in, load any wounded onto the chopper, secure a perimeter, and mount a counter-attack. Intel was murky as to the number of Charlies in the vicinity. Maybe only a few units. Then again, maybe enough to pack the cheap seats at Shea Stadium.
“Huey’s gonna buzz us in right on top of them!” Oddy’s voice rose above the rotor wash. “We’re coming in hot, dump and run, throttle wide open!”
“Bust ’em up!” Daniel “Zippo” Coles bellowed, fingering the trigger of his LPO-50 flame-thrower.
“Bust ’em open!” Alex “Slash” Trimball hollered. The son of a sharecropper, Trimball’s barracks cot at Ho-Ngoc-Tao was lined with nine neon dashboard Jesus sculptures. His tongue was black from the Benzedrine tabs he’d been chewing.
You’re everything a big bad wolf could want…
The dustoff came into view. The Cobras laid down suppressor fire, strafing the jungle. The Huey pilot brought the bird down to fifteen feet and the men tossed lengths of jute cord from the cab, clipping on and rappelling to the ground. The door gunner laid down a line of cover fire, feet braced on the chopper’s landing strut, M60 kicking against his chest. Spent 7.62mm longjacket casings glanced off the bulkhead and skidplates, pinwheeling, falling, reflecting brilliant yellow sunlight filtering through a bank of thin afternoon clouds.
Oddy signaled to the pilot, who tugged on the steering yoke and guided the chopper to a landing site some seven-hundred yards distant, beyond the range of Charlie’s mortars. As the Huey rose into the cobalt-blue sky, the young door gunner kept firing and firing, M60 barrel glowing white from the heat. His mouth was wide open and he may have been screaming but his voice could not be heard above the gunfire and scything chopper blades.
“Scatter!” Oddy shouted. “Get these boys up and out of here!”
The men broke apart and pursued separate tangents through wind-tossed whorls of elephant grass. Their tiger-striped fatigues, made from high-tensile parachute nylon, blended with the tropical foliage seamlessly; the soldiers melted into the vegetation.
They reconnoitered two-hundred yards distant, in a circle of tamped grass where the LuRPS were pinned down. The site was partially ringed by a thicket of mangroves, trunks shattered by RPG missiles, branches splintered from AK-47 rounds. In several places the grass and earth had been blown apart in deep craters where mortar rounds had detonated. Beyond the mangroves lay a field of elephant grass pocketed with cypress thickets. The field was perhaps eight-hundred yards long, terminating at a dense glade of breadfruit, cinnamon, and palmetto trees. The sun beat down like a superheated fist, the humidity so intense it felt as though every breath was drawn through boiled fleece.
The 9th was in rough shape. A freckle-faced kid resembling a young Richard Chamberlain squirted blood from his femoral artery. Another man with Lieutenant’s chevrons n
ursed a sucking chest wound, eyes bugged out and glassy; he screamed for someone named “Davey.” A black kid lay on a bed of crushed banana leaves sans right leg, chest pin-cushioned with so many morphine syrettes he resembled some freakish sort of hedgehog. All three were in shock, their faces ashen, beyond the realm of pain.
A whey-faced medic was slicked to the elbows in blood with his hands buried deep in the belly of a dead Marine. He jerked his wrists up hard, dislodging a jagged star of mortar-shell from the dead man’s ribcage. He hurled it into the grass and said, “It’s gonna be okay, Hollywood,” then rooted through his medical ruck for the Granulex blood coagulant. “I’ll have you back on your feet toot sweet.” He sprayed Granulex along the raw edges of the wound while the gutshot Lieutenant wailed on and on: “Davey! Davey! Daaa–vey!”
Tony “Tripwire” Walker, Blackjack’s demolitions expert, leaned over the medic. “Easy, man,” he told him. “He’s gone. Nothing you can do.”
The medic stared up at Tripwire. His eyes were huge, the pupils dilated. His hands continued to push at the dead Marine’s guts, pushing with no real sense of purpose or understanding, as though it were somehow possible to jam all the blood back inside. “I gotta get out of here,” he said. “Can’t hack this shit no more.”
“Help me stabilize the others and get them to the Huey,” Tripwire said, leading him away, “then you’re going home.”
Tripwire went over to the black kid. Since being taught basic field medicine at Camp Pendleton, he’d become Blackjack’s meatball medic. He unshouldered his M-5 medical ruck and pulled out a bottle of Betadine, a suture kit, a blister pack of Dexedrine tablets, plus several ultra-absorbency Kotex pads. He plucked the morphine syrettes out of the black kid’s chest and asked his name.
“D-D-Dale.” This kid was seventeen years old, Tripwire guessed. Lied about his age, draft board only too willing to look the other way. His skin was the gray of a rotted potato. “A-a-am I go…gonna b-b-be o-okay?”
“You’ll be fine,” Tripwire said. It was a lie, but in a conflict built on lies, in a military machine that ran on lies, in a situation where men told lies to keep insanity at bay, this particular falsehood tripped off Tripwire’s tongue with slick ease. “Be pumpin’ Siagon whores by nightfall.”
Tripwire felt around the base of Dale’s right thigh. The limb was raggedly severed above the knee. His fingers came in contact with something wet, hard, and slippery: the kid’s femur.
Karoumph, karoumph. Two artillery rounds exploded in a cypress grove three-hundred yards distant.
“What do you think?” Tripwire asked the medic.
“Let me check his pulse.” Leaning over Dale, the medic found his left wrist. “Racing and weak—165 beats per minute, I’d say.”
“You got serum albumin?”
“In my kit.”
While the medic set up an IV flow, Tripwire tore Dale’s fatigues up to the groin to get a better look at the wound. The meat of his thigh was badly chewed, most of the flesh blown clear off the bone. The femur shone wetly in the crisp sunlight, red muscle encased in a thin layer of adipose tissue. Tripwire saw a white blood vessel sticking out of the mess, blood spritzing from the vein like water from a spigot.
“Tourniquet him off high on the thigh,” Tripwire instructed.
After the medic had cinched Dale’s leg with an M-16 strap and stemmed the blood flow, Tripwire removed a hemostat clamp from the med kit, clamped it to the end of the bleeding vessel, and tied the end off with a piece of black surgical thread. He then padded the wound with Kotex before wrapping the stump in an Ace bandage. While he operated, the medic worked an IV needle into a vein in Dale’s hand and pumped in blood-plasma expander. The black soldier smiled slightly, laying back and closing his eyes.
“Good as we can do,” Tripwire said. “Let’s hoof your Lieutenant to the Huey.”
The medic unfolded a portable back-board and together they shuttled the wounded Lieutenant down a speed trail to the Huey’s landing zone. The man kept screaming: “Davey! Daaa–veey!” Tripwire knew the Lieutenant would probably be dead long before he reached the medical center at Da Nang. The same could be said for Dale and the other one. Maybe it was futile, but that didn’t matter. They were Marines. You did everything you could to save a fellow Marine’s life, even if it meant dying yourself.
By this time the other six members of Blackjack had moved to the clearing’s perimeter, where the remaining LuRPS were positioned. The 9th unit’s baby-faced corpsman looked barely old enough to deliver the Sunday paper.
“You got Charlie everywhere!” he screamed. “I mean, every–fuckin–where!”
Oddy said, “I can dig it.”
“I’m glad you can,” the corpsman said, “because I am flaking like fucking tuna!”
“Just chill, son.”
“Yeah, pacify.” Zippo lit the stub of a Swisher Sweets cigarillo on the shaft of blue flame thrown by his weapon’s pilot light. “Cavalry’s here to save your sorry asses.”
“Zip that lip,” Oddy told him. To the corpsman: “Where’s Charlie at?”
The corpsman pointed across the knee-high elephant grass to a dense glade. “In there. Don’t know how many.” He looked around frantically, eyes darting too fast to focus on anything or anyone. “Seems like a fuckin’ thousand!”
“LuRPS,” Slash said, chewing on the word like it was a turd while scanning the soldiers’ shit-scared faces. “I guess someone’s been lying to me.”
“Who?” a sandy-haired LuRP asked.
“The guy who told me you pussies were hardcore.”
“I said zip that lip.”
The low thoomp of a mortar being launched was followed by a whistling sweeee as it streamed through the air.
“Asses down!” Oddy hollered. The soldiers crouched low as the round passed directly overhead, landing thirty feet behind them. The ground shook as shrapnel cut through the grass and thumped into mangrove trunks.
“Charlie’s zeroing in,” Zippo said, shaking dirt off his collar.
“You and your men diddlybop,” Oddy told the corpsman. “Help your medic transport the wounded to the Huey’s LZ and send my man forward. Dig me, dogface?”
“You sure?” The corpsman peered up at Oddy from beneath the brim of his piss-cutter helmet. “There’s only, what, six of you?”
“Hey,” said one of the LuRPS, “the man told us to diddlybop.” He looked at the corpsman, then at the big black Sergeant, as if expecting Oddy to experience a sudden change of heart. “He gave us a direct order.”
“Yeah,” said Frank “Gunner” Hardcastle, Blackjack’s machine-gunner, 250 pounds of ripped Iowa farm muscle with bad attitude to spare. “Get thee gone.”
“Okay,” said the relieved corpsman, turning to address the remaining LuRPS. “Hustle back to LZ double-time. Jackson, you and Henried hoof Phillips. Samuelson and me got—”
Suddenly there were several loud hollow pops and someone shouted, “Incoming!” Seconds later the first of a half-dozen mortar rounds landed in the grass twenty yards behind the men.
When the sound of the explosions receded, Oddy heard screaming.
A mortar shell had struck the corpsman high on the left arm, just beneath the shoulder. While the deadhead round hadn’t exploded, the force of its downwards trajectory was enough to tear the corpsman’s arm off. He stood looking down at his arm in the green, green grass, the fingers still twitching, biceps flexing convulsively.
The corpsman made the sounds a baby will make when he is trying to work up the breath for a good scream. Blood spurted from the wound, plastering his face in red sheets. The corpsman’s right hand clenched around the butt of his M-16, fingers squeezing the trigger. The clip emptied in a rapid cook-off, slugs slamming into the earth and punching through his shins, feet, kneecaps, toes. The young corpsman dropped onto the grass with a grunting sigh. He fell forward on his face into a clump of small yellow flowers.
“Hightail him back to the Huey,” Oddy said.
; “Jesus, man,” the sandy-haired LuRP said, “he’s wormfood!”
“Hoof…him…back.”
“Okay,” the LuRP said, moving toward the body. “You got it.”
Tripwire and the medic had loaded the Huey by the time the remaining LuRPS reconnoitered with their dead corpsman. Tripwire helped them onto the bird, receiving their grateful looks and whispered thanks with a curt nod.
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