Baptism

by Donald E. Zlotnik

James raised his eyebrows and smiled before he sneered at the sergeant. “I’m here to learn Recondo techniques. You teach and I learn….”

  “It says here that you’re assigned to the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division. You with the Recon Company?”

  “Not yet!” James stood up. “But I plan to be!”

  “Go on back to your class.” McDonald looked James directly in the eyes. “Don’t plan on killing any honkies in my school…friend!”

  James paused in the doorway and looked back over his shoulder. “Don’t call me friend, Sergeant.”

  McDonald watched the door close. He wondered if James was just playing a game, but he didn’t plan on taking any chances. He remembered hearing rumors that a group of Black Panthers were killing white soldiers during firefights in the 4th Division, but they were just rumors.

  The first two weeks of Recondo School passed by very quickly for Barnett and Woods. It was obvious that the two of them were competing for the honor graduate position in the class, along with Mohammed James. The last week would be a seven-day patrol in the jungles surrounding Nha Trang where they would put to the test all of the techniques they had learned in the classroom.

  Barnett lay on his cot with his fingers laced behind his head. “Do you think we’ll run into any Vietcong on patrol?”

  “Who knows! This is Vietnam.” Woods adjusted the straps on his pack and lifted it off his bed. He shook the bundle to see if there were any rattles coming from the pack. “The last class got three kills up on the mountains south of here.”

  “The instructor said that we’re going to be inserted by helicopter about eight miles from here. There’s a bridge and a large rice field north of it.” Barnett rolled over on his side.

  “We might run into some VC… if they’re harvesting the fields at night.” Woods felt a lump in his stomach.

  “What instructor do you think we’ll get?” Barnett was hoping for a good one.

  “We should know in a few hours. The teams will be posted on the bulletin board.” Woods checked his ammo pouches and adjusted the straps. He wanted everything to be perfect. Barnett was nine points ahead of him for honor graduate, and James was three points ahead. He couldn’t afford any gigs on his gear for the patrol.

  “If we capture a prisoner, we get a seven-day R and R to Australia and five hundred dollars to spend!” Barnett sat up on his cot.

  “Don’t hold your breath, partner!” Woods laughed.

  “Do you think they’ll put us on patrol together?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I hope not. I want some good men around me!”

  “You fucking bastard!” Barnett dove at Woods and caught him around the waist. “I’m going to kick your ass!”

  Woods was laughing too hard to fight back. “Get off me! Save your energy for the VC!”

  Barnett pretended he was cutting Woods’s throat with his finger and made a slicing sound.

  “You white boys fuck around a lot….” James passed by their bunks.

  Barnett glared at the black.

  “You seem to have an attitude problem, white boy.” James stopped and looked down at Barnett, who was still on top of Woods. “Don’t you like black people?”

  Woods squeezed Barnett’s wrist. “Not here, Spencer. They’ll throw you out of this school.”

  “Don’t fuck with black folk over here, Southern boy, ’cause we’s gots guns and we ain’t afraid to use them!”

  James looked up and saw McDonald standing in the doorway watching him. He smiled at the senior sergeant and walked back to his bunk at the end of the barracks. McDonald stood watching for a couple of seconds and then left the building without speaking to anyone.

  The clerk from the orderly room pushed the thumbtacks into each corner of the roster that listed each of the patrols for the week-long exercise. He hadn’t finished the last thumbtack before there were trainees looking over his shoulder.

  Woods saw the cluster of troops around the bulletin board and shook Barnett awake by grabbing his boot. “The roster’s posted.”

  Barnett wiggled in between a couple of trainees and looked down the list. He saw his name surrounded by four others.

  BARNETT

  FILLMORE

  JAMES

  WOODS

  TAYLOR

  Team Leader: MSG McDONALD

  “Holy fuck! McDonald’s our Recon Team Leader!” Barnett scurried back out of the pack to where Woods waited for him.

  “McDonald?” David was surprised. “He never goes out anymore. I asked earlier if we could be assigned to him, and the instructor told us that he had been shot up really bad when he was assigned to CCN and he didn’t go out in the field anymore.”

  “His name’s on the roster!” Barnett was happy. He had really grown to like McDonald over the past two weeks.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m going back to check my gear again.” Woods knew that the senior sergeant would be extra hard on him and Barnett because it had become common knowledge that the NCO liked them.

  Woods lay awake on his bunk. He hadn’t even gotten undressed. The bright moonlight filtered in through the screened window, along with a soft breeze coming off the South China Sea. The heavy plywood shutter shook a little and rattled the steel hook that normally locked it in place against the side of the building. They would be leaving in the morning on their first combat patrol. He wasn’t scared, just nervous a little over facing the unknown. The war would start for him in the morning. Master Sergeant McDonald had checked all of their gear right after supper and assigned Barnett and Fillmore to the M-60 light machine gun. He had been given one of the new CAR-15s to carry during the recon mission and was happy with the selection. All of them had test-fired over fifty different weapons during their training, and he liked the CAR-15 the best. McDonald had personally insured that he and Barnett knew how to operate all of the North Vietnamese small arms, including the Russian pistols. The sergeant had reinforced in him that he would never be without a weapon or out of ammo if he knew how to operate the enemy’s weapons. It made good sense.

  Woods smelled smoke, turned his head, and saw the red tip of a cigarette burning at the far end of the hootch. James was awake also. Woods wondered what made him tick. It was obvious that James hated whites as much as Barnett hated blacks. That thought made him nervous, knowing that both of them would be on the same recon mission. The only good thing about it was that McDonald would be there.

  Woods didn’t know when he finally fell asleep. The hootch door opening woke him up. Two of the sergeants from the Recondo School walked down the aisle waking the trainees up by gently tapping the frames of their bunks; no one was sleeping heavily. The latrine was quiet as the men put their camouflage paint on their faces. Barnett used a tiger-stripe design and drew a set of black fangs at the corners of his mouth that reached down to the bottom of his chin. Woods smiled when Barnett looked at him and shook his head.

  The sun was bright when they lined up next to the helipad for their final inspection by their recon leaders. McDonald took his time checking each one of his men. He gave Barnett five demerits for his camouflage makeup but grinned, anyway. There was a long pause when McDonald reached James, and the two of them stared at each other before the sergeant checked the soldier’s gear. Woods sensed that there was something going on between the two of them, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  McDonald finished his inspection and lit up a cigarette. It would be the last one he would smoke for seven days. “Relax… we’ve got a couple of minutes before the choppers fire up. Remember, no talking once we insert, and whispering only in emergencies! I want a good deployment!” McDonald sat down on the warm PSP and leaned his back against his pack. He watched James.

  Woods sat in the open door of the UH-1D Iroquois and looked down at the river they were flying over. Fishing boats and barges loaded with sacks of rice moved slowly toward the large city of Nha Trang at the mouth of the river. Master Sergeant McDonald had told them that the f
light time from the Recondo School helipad to the field site would be only a few minutes. Woods felt the muscles around his rectum tighten, and a sour taste filled his mouth. He knew he was scared. Woods looked over at the other men riding in the helicopter with him. James sat with his back to him and he couldn’t see his face, but Woods could see James’s hand, and he was flicking the safety switch on and off on his M16. Fillmore carried extra ammo for the M-60 he was teamed with and an M-79 grenade launcher. He kept changing the round in the launcher from HE, high explosive, to a new flechette round that contained over fifty small darts about the size of a tenpenny nail with fins. McDonald had brought a case of the experimental rounds with him when he had left Command and Control North. The senior sergeant sat calmly, leaning out of the aircraft looking for their landing zone. Barnett glanced over at Woods and smiled. He had been waiting a long time for the opportunity to fight and was probably the only one on the Huey who was hoping the enemy would be waiting for them when they landed. The odds were against Barnett’s wish. The Recondo School had selected the training reconnaissance patrols very carefully, so that there would be no major action. The area that they were going to patrol was a major rice-producing valley that fed the majority of the population around Nha Trang. A very well-trained Vietnamese Civilian Force and a battalion of South Vietnamese regulars patrolled the valley and the low-lying hills. The recon training team was being inserted just to the north of the valley, well within range of supporting fires from the friendly ARVN artillery units.

  The helicopter touched down lightly on the blown-down elephant grass. Woods slipped out of the chopper and found out that he sank another three feet in the tall grass before his feet touched solid ground. He ran away from the chopper and dropped down to one knee with his CAR-15 pointed toward a thick line of trees twenty meters away.

  The Huey backed away from the hillside and left. It became quiet… totally quiet… so quiet that Woods could hear the fear hiding in his stomach. He looked around for McDonald and saw him waving for the team to assemble. The movement when Woods ran to join up with the team felt good; it forced the fear to hide again. McDonald tapped each of the men on their shoulders and pointed to where he wanted them to go. He tapped Fillmore twice, which signaled that he would be the point man, followed by Barnett with the machine gun. McDonald nodded, and Fillmore moved out to the thick line of trees.

  Woods was the rear guard and turned constantly in a half-circle to insure that the recon patrol wasn’t ambushed from behind. He was just inside of the trees and felt a little more secure when the M-60 machine gun opened fire. David felt the crotch of his pants get warm from the urine. He had been caught off-guard, even though he was extremely alert. The sound of the automatic weapon had startled him.

  McDonald had been caught off-guard also, but his reaction was different; he rushed past James and Taylor to reach the point man and Barnett. The machine gun broke the silence again with four series of six- to eight-round bursts, just like the book said to fire the light machine gun. McDonald noticed that Barnett was moving away from them each time the gun sounded. He felt fear and hoped that Barnett and Fillmore hadn’t stumbled on a friendly local-forces patrol and mistaken them for Vietcong. Suddenly McDonald broke through the underbrush onto a hidden trail. The canopy formed by the trees had completely closed over the three-foot-wide path. Five North Vietnamese soldiers lay evenly spaced on the red-earth path. McDonald could see the sandaled feet of another NVA sticking out from the edge of the jungle. Fillmore was in the prone position just past the last dead NVA, his M-79 pointed down the trail.

  McDonald dropped down by his side. He could see that the young soldier was almost in shock. He touched Fillmore’s shoulder and spoke softly. “Where’s Barnett?”

  “Oh, shit, Sarge!” The relief was clearly evident in the young soldier’s voice. “He’s chasing a couple of NVA down the trail!”

  “Chasing them?” McDonald was astonished.

  “Yeah!”

  The sound of an M16 barking to their rear brought McDonald and Fillmore around. The M-60 answered down the trail. Woods broke through the brush, followed seconds later by James. McDonald waved them into a defensive position and used his radio to call back to the base area for a reaction force. The Recondo School had made arrangements with the Special Forces headquarters in Nha Trang to have one of their Nung Mobile Strike Force Companies on strip alert when the Recondo School had trainees in the field. The Mobile Strike Force Company had never been used since the school had been established, until now. Six North Vietnamese in an area where they had never been sighted before was enough reason to activate the force as far as McDonald was concerned.

  “Where’s Taylor?” McDonald leaned over James but kept his eyes scanning the trail and the jungle.

  “Still in the jungle. We saw a couple VC.” James’s voice was slightly muffled as he spoke, looking down.

  Barnett appeared on the trail. Fillmore nearly shot him with a flechette round from the M-79. He had been so scared during the short encounter that he had forgotten to fire even one round. Less than five minutes had passed from the touchdown of the chopper to Barnett’s reappearance.

  McDonald waved for Barnett to join him. “What happened?”

  Barnett dropped down next to the senior sergeant with his back facing in the opposite direction. “When we broke out on this trail, they were just turning around that bend”—Barnett pointed—“with their backs to us.”

  McDonald heard the sound of the helicopters just as a voice came over his radio asking for landing instructions. He nodded at Barnett and waved for the team to secure the area. He took Woods with him and went back the short distance to the landing zone and directed in the Mobile Strike Force’s first platoon. The American sergeant who led the force took over the task of securing the area, and McDonald joined his recon team. Within an hour the rest of the Nung Mobile Strike Force had landed and formed a defensive circle around the area.

  Taylor was still missing, and McDonald was worried that the man might have gotten separated from the patrol during the brief firefight. A Nung patrol returned carrying three NVA bodies. Barnett hadn’t missed. The total kill was nine North Vietnamese regulars, and all of them were confirmed kills for one man: Barnett.

  The American sergeant who led the Nung Company dropped down next to McDonald. He wore a grim expression on his face. “We found your man. He’s dead.”

  McDonald flexed his jaw. He was angry. He did not take losing his men lightly, and losing a trainee was even worse. McDonald turned his head and saw James staring at him. The look in the man’s eyes gave him away. “I want to see the body.”

  “We’ve got him wrapped in a poncho on the LZ.” The junior sergeant looked at McDonald as if he had gone off his rocker.

  “Don’t ship him out until I get there; first I want to check out these NVA for documents.” McDonald beckoned Barnett and Woods over to him. “Search them thoroughly. Unbutton their shirts and pants and check for items taped to their skin….” He saw the pistol belt and the red collar tabs and knew that the second NVA was an officer. McDonald went over to the body and personally searched it. The man was carrying a full leather pouch over his shoulder. McDonald lifted him up and removed the document carrier, placing it on the trail while he continued searching the body for anything that could be useful to the intelligence people. He removed the soldier’s collar tabs, pistol belt, and wallet. McDonald made notes in his green, Army-issue notepad on the condition of the uniforms and even recorded small comments about the cleanliness of the bodies and uniforms, the condition of the NVA equipment, the physical condition of the soldiers before they died, and anything else that he thought the intelligence community could use.

  Woods had joined McDonald just as the sergeant opened the fat leather pouch the NVA officer had been wearing over his shoulder.

  “Holy shit!” Woods whispered the words between his clenched teeth.

  Master Sergeant McDonald reached in and pulled out one of the bundles o
f American hundred-dollar bills. “Now you know where all of this green money is going when you think you’re getting over by trading a hundred dollars green for three hundred dollars of MPC….”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Sergeant!” Woods was serious, he wouldn’t, but McDonald knew a lot of his contemporaries who did exchange green dollars for MPC downtown for a profit.

  “Barnett caught a courier detail taking money back up north. Looks like a couple hundred thousand dollars are in this pouch. No wonder they tried running rather than fighting.” McDonald looked down the trail where Barnett lay resting. The young soldier smiled when his favorite sergeant looked at him. “They were finance people, not infantry.”

  “Are these guys NVA…regulars?” Woods stared at the dead officer.

  “Yes.”

  James joined the sergeant and Woods. He had been watching, and when he saw the sergeant reach in the leather pouch and remove a bundle of American money, he became very interested. “You know, Sergeant, we could split that loot up between us and nobody would know the difference….”

  McDonald glared at James before he spoke. “I would.” He shoved the money back in the pouch. “Our intelligence people can draw a lot of information from these bills and their serial numbers. Maybe we can catch the bastards who are supporting the North Vietnamese war effort!”

  “What do you mean by that shit, Sergeant?” James’s voice mocked the senior NCO.

  “What I mean is, when a GI sells his green dollars to what he thinks is a whore, he’s supplying the North Vietnamese with much-needed international currency that they use to buy weapons from China and Russia. Their money ain’t worth shit! They need American dollars or gold.” McDonald sealed the pouch and slipped it over his shoulder. “Let’s go back to the LZ.”

  “Are we leaving, Sergeant?” Barnett joined them.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought this was a seven-day patrol!” Barnett was pissed.

  McDonald stopped walking and turned around to look at the seventeen-year-old. “You fucking amaze me!”