Baptism

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Arnason’s team took turns sleeping during the afternoon. Woods couldn’t believe how deep he slept, lying in the warm sunlight. When he awoke, he felt like shit, but after a few minutes he could feel the positive effects the deep REM sleep had had on him. He was alert and rested.

  Arnason waved for Woods to join him. Sinclair was sleeping soundly, along with the SF sergeant, who looked as if he had died with his mouth hanging open. Reed felt bad about having to wake the sergeant twice; he had started snoring loudly each time he had slipped into a deep sleep. Woods knelt down next to Arnason and bent over so the sergeant didn’t have to get up.

  “Fitz should have been here by now. If he doesn’t show up in an hour, we’ve got to go look for him.” Arnason didn’t like the idea, but Fitzpatrick and the Special Forces lieutenant could have gotten lost.

  Woods nodded and returned to his position. He didn’t like the idea of going back down the trail, especially with night beginning to fall and whatever had killed that tiger still out there. The more he thought about the lager site, the better he liked the selection. The narrow finger of rock, bamboo, and moss patches would be easy to protect from three sides, and the portion that connected with the mountainside was narrow enough to defend against everything but a large determined enemy force. He looked down the rock side of the ridge and decided that if he had to, he could slide down it for a couple hundred meters, escape, and evade, but only if he really had to.

  Sinclair saw the point man first and tapped Arnason awake. Fitzpatrick’s team had arrived just as it was getting dark and stumbled into the small lager area.

  “Oh, fuck! What a hump!” Fitzpatrick almost broke out in a normal voice.

  “Here…” Arnason handed him his canteen full of cold water.

  Fitzpatrick drained the container and looked at his friend. “Where did you find cold water?”

  Arnason leaned over and whispered. “About five meters over there,” he said, pointing, “is a small stream that comes out of the mountain. You’ll hear it before you see it.”

  Fitzpatrick signaled for his team to follow him, and they all refilled their canteens and watered down good before returning to where Arnason waited. James and Brown brought up the rear, water still dripping off their chins from where they had washed their faces. Arnason could see the cool water had made a big difference in their morale. He showed them their selected night lager sites that had been partially prepared for them. When it had started getting late, Arnason and Sinclair had stacked some of the smaller boulders into semicircles in each of the positions and figured Fitz’s team could finish the job when they got there.

  Fitzpatrick put Brown and Kirkpatrick at one fighting point, and Fillmore and James at the other. He stayed with the SF officer, even though he didn’t want to spend the night with him, but the night before, when he’d stayed with James, he had caught him smoking dope. Fitz liked his stuff but not in the field.

  Fitz’s team had barely removed their backpacks when the darkness slipped in. There was no gradual darkening in the jungle. One minute it was dim light under the canopy, and within ten minutes it was pitch-black, especially in the high mountains when the sun slipped behind a ridge line.

  Woods took the first watch, and for a couple of hours he heard soft rustling coming from Fitz’s team as they ate and tried improving their positions, but around midnight the perimeter became quiet. Once during the night an NVA unit on the trail passed, making a lot of loud noise. David let Barnett sleep an extra three hours before waking him. It was two in the morning, and instead of breaking up the night in two shifts each, he thought the extra-long rest would be good for Barnett, who never complained, but Woods knew he was exhausted from taking the point all day. He reached over to wake him, then decided on letting him sleep until he got tired. Woods sat Indian-style, his poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders. He thought of home and going back to college. Life was going to be sweet after the war, and he had decided that he wasn’t going to waste a single minute of it.

  Woods opened his eyes. He was instantly angry for falling asleep. He listened to the night sounds. Something had woken him up. He felt for his CAR-15 on his lap and found it. He listened harder to the night sounds and heard nothing unusual. The hair on the back of his neck rose and sent a shiver down his spine. Something was wrong. He tried thinking if he had dreamed and couldn’t remember. He sat alert for over a half hour, then relaxed his back against the rocks. It must have been a bad dream. A sour taste filled his mouth, and he felt next to his leg for his plastic canteen and unscrewed the top. His hearing was so fine-tuned that he heard the small grains of dirt grinding under the cap. Woods placed the opening to his mouth and took a sip.

  The scream caused his arm to jerk, and he poured water down the front of his jacket.

  Barnett jerked up from his damp bed. “Wha-what!”

  “Help me! Oh, God, please help me! Ahhhhhh…”

  Barnett searched in the dark for Woods. “What’s going on?” He was disoriented in the dark and had burst out from a deep sleep.

  Woods had his CAR-15 pointed in the direction of the screaming man. “Shit! I don’t know. It sounds like Fill-more.”

  “Help… oh! Help me… Sarge!” The voice sounded as if it were moving away from them and down the side of the mountain.

  A short burst from an M-16, followed by a long one, filled the jungle.

  It became quiet.

  The darkness closed in even darker, and Woods could feel Barnett pressing against his side. He was glad; if Barnett hadn’t found him, he would have found Barnett. They were scared—more than scared, they were scared shitless.

  Arnason realized that his team was on the verge of panicking, and in a calm voice he called out that everything was all right and he would check it out. The effect was instantaneous. Woods and Barnett took up firing positions and waited. Sinclair pushed off the safety on his weapon and squinted his eyes, trying to see in the dark. The team was ready to fight.

  Arnason crawled over to Fillmore and James’s position and felt a hot M16 shell under his hand. He couldn’t see, but he knew that he was near and whispered softly.

  “James?”

  There was no answer.

  “James?” Arnason heard the heavy breathing and reached out and touched James’s boot. “James, you all right?”

  There was a long pause, and then James answered, “Oh, fuck, man. Oh, fuck…”

  Arnason crawled up next to the man and reached along his body until he felt his collar. He shook him gently. “What happened?”

  “I… I was sleeping. Fillmore kicked me—he kicked me hard—and then the next thing I heard was him screaming!”

  “Shh, it’s okay!” Arnason could feel the man shaking in his hands.

  “It wasn’t no NVA—” James’s voice broke. “That motherfucking thing growled!”

  Arnason let go of James’s jacket. He knew what had happened: Fillmore had been taken from his position by a tiger. The thought made him feel sick. What a horrible fucking way to die.

  No one slept the rest of the night. The two Special Forces men didn’t need to be told what had happened. There had been incidents before on patrol at night where a tiger had circled their perimeter for hours before leaving, but it had never attacked before. The Bru tribesmen had reported sighting a large female tiger in the area, but no one took them seriously because she would have to weigh close to seven hundred pounds from their description of her, and the very largest Asian tiger even recorded weighed only five hundred.

  Morning came with sighs of relief from the recon teams. The light took the fear away. Reed called all of the men together, and he explained what had happened to Fillmore. There was no time to search for his body because the NVA had surely heard James’s M16 firing and would be coming after them in force. It was now a matter of survival for all of them. Reed seemed calmer than he should have been, but then again he was probably maturing as a combat leader. Arnason grinned. There was hope for the young officer, after all
.

  The combined teams loaded up their gear and formed into a single line to move down the mountainside. The Special Forces lieutenant insisted on taking the point, and Sinclair automatically found his position in the rear. Woods watched Lieutenant Reed’s back and waited for the officer to start moving so that he could follow. They were going to take the shortest way possible down to the A Shau Valley floor, and then make a dash for the A-camp. The lieutenant told them that the point was too steep to travel down safely, even though that was the way the tigress had gone with Fillmore. The plan was to leave the night lager site on the point and then hit the trail for a couple hundred meters until they could find a site on the side of the mountain that wasn’t so steep.

  The Chicom thirty-six-inch claymore killed the two Special Forces men and Fitzpatrick instantly. James was knocked unconscious from the blast, and Kirkpatrick took a single ball bearing through the palm of his left hand.

  Barnett was the first one to react to the NVA ambush that had been waiting for the recon team to come off the finger of rock. The ambush was nearly perfect, except the NVA officer had acted too soon; if he would have waited another couple of minutes, the second team would have been cut off from an escape back to the ridge. Two NVA fell backward from their hiding places behind a hardwood tree as Spencer raked the surrounding jungle with a long burst from his CAR-15.

  Arnason threw two hand grenades and killed the team that had detonated the claymore.

  Kirkpatrick was struggling with Brown’s body when Lieutenant Reed backed up into them. “Let’s go! He’s dead!”

  Kirkpatrick’s eyes widened. “No! I can’t leave him here!”

  “Let’s go! We’ll come back and get him later!” Reed pushed Kirkpatrick back toward the last safe place he knew, the ridge line. A single NVA twisted around the edge of a tree, and Reed caught him across the chest with a short burst.

  Arnason, Barnett, and Woods walked backward and laid down a heavy, suppressive fire while they retreated back to their old fighting positions.

  The NVA officer barked orders to his platoon, and the air whistled with AK-47 rounds cutting through the brush, and Chicom hand grenades exploding.

  Woods dropped down on one knee to change magazines, and Barnett covered for him. Lieutenant Reed and Kirkpatrick broke out of the jungle right in front of them, and Barnett almost shot them but waved them past instead.

  Sinclair had still been waiting on the ridge for the column to clear the area when the claymore had detonated and he still hadn’t fired a round. He watched as Reed and Kirkpatrick stumbled back toward him. He could see Woods’s and Barnett’s backs, and then Arnason appeared through the dark green brush.

  “Over here!” Sinclair threw one of his hand grenades and called out again, “Over here!”

  The remainder of the recon teams stumbled back toward the familiar voice. Sinclair hadn’t been wasting his time. He had set up the two claymore mines he was carrying and had drawn his team members back between them.

  There was a pause in the firing. The NVA commander was regrouping his force. Arnason dropped down next to Sinclair. “We’re going down the side of the ravine.”

  Sinclair nodded. “Let me blast these first.”

  “No! You go. I’ll be the rear guard!” Barnett shoved Sinclair hard in the direction in which the rest of the team had gone.

  “I’m the rear guard!” Sinclair growled the words out.

  “Not today. Someone has to take care of the kids!”

  That was the only thing Barnett could have said that would have made Sinclair leave the claymores.

  Sinclair’s eyes changed focus for a second, and then he took off after Arnason. The NVA opened fire from the jungle, and a round caught Sinclair in the back just below his shoulder blade. He flipped forward from the impact and rolled back up onto his feet. There was no pain, only a numbness in his side.

  Barnett squatted down and laid his CAR-15 across his legs. He held a claymore detonator in each hand and waited. A slight sound to his left rear drew his attention, and he glanced over in that direction. Woods crouched with his CAR-15 at the ready.

  “Get the fuck out of here. I’ll follow as soon as I blast these!” Barnett looked back in the direction of the NVA.

  Woods saw the NVA coming first, and fired a long burst. The blast from the claymores deafened both of the Americans. Barnett got up on his feet and started down the ridge line with Woods fighting a brief rear action. His CAR-15 popped, signaling that it was empty. He started running down the team’s path and saw Barnett waiting. As soon as he passed him, he heard Barnett’s CAR-15. Woods ran hard until he reached Arnason, who was trying to drag Sinclair to the edge of the ravine. Woods grabbed hold of Sinclair’s web harness on one side, and Arnason grabbed the other and they went over the edge. The loose gravel gave way, and the three of them slid a hundred meters before any of them could gain a foothold.

  Spencer saw the pack of NVA break free of the jungle a dozen feet in front of him. He couldn’t hear anything because of the claymore blasts. He squeezed his CAR-15’s trigger and a three-round burst came out, then the weapon was empty. He reached for his Browning 9-mm when the first NVA hit him and was instantly joined by three more. Spencer struggled and fought hard, but there were too many of them. The last thing he remembered was the blurred image of something coming toward his head, and then everything went blank.

  Woods let go of Sinclair as soon as they had stopped sliding on the loose rock and immediately started trying to climb back up the steep incline. Arnason grabbed him and threw him down on the sharp rocks, but Woods didn’t feel any pain.

  “I’ve got to go back and help Spencer!”

  “We’ll wait for him down in the valley!”

  “No!”

  “Go!” Arnason shoved Woods in the direction of the valley floor and the remaining team members.

  “I can’t leave Spencer. I promised him!”

  “If he’s still alive, he’ll make it… just like we did!”

  Woods thought for a second and realized that there was no way he could climb back up the loose rocks.

  Arnason broke Woods’s indecision. “Help me with Sinclair or he won’t make it!”

  Woods slung his CAR-15 over his shoulder, grabbed Sinclair by his harness, and helped Arnason drag him to cover seconds before a dozen Chicom grenades and three American M-26s came flying over the edge of the ridge down to where they had been standing in the loose gravel. The explosions echoed along the valley floor and could be heard in the A-camp.

  The Special Forces captain stood in the doorway of his command bunker and looked up at the mountainside. He was wondering how many of the men from the recon teams would return. All of the seismic-intrusion devices were working perfectly, and they had already been sending back information; what none of the recon team members knew was that one of each set of sensors was a top-secret audio transmitter that was designed especially to monitor sound along the highly used Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  SEVEN

  Prisoner of War

  The Special Forces captain led the relief force himself. He used the knoll to the west of his A-camp as a reference point and didn’t need to use his lensatic compass once. He led a company of Tau-Oi, a tough group of fighting men. The C-team was sending him two MIKE Force companies of Nungs out of Da Nang to reinforce his rescue attempt, and the 1st Cavalry Division had promised an infantry battalion as soon as one was available.

  The captain pushed his lead element hard. The weather was good, but in the A Shau, that could change with a wind shift. He wanted to have the landing zone secured as soon as possible for the MIKE Force. He knew from prior experience that they would only make one attempt to land, then would be forced to return to Da Nang because they would be low on fuel.

  Arnason kept looking back over his shoulder. He was praying that there would be more survivors from the ambush. Woods was carrying Sinclair piggyback. The shock had worn off, and Sinclair was starting to bleed a lot. Kirkpatrick and Lieutenant
Reed broke trail down to the valley floor.

  Woods felt the sweat form a stream between his chest muscles and flow down to his belt line where it was absorbed in the cloth. He knew that he couldn’t travel far with Sinclair’s dead weight bouncing around on his back; besides, he wasn’t going to get too far away from Barnett.

  Lieutenant Reed stopped and dropped down on one knee. He waited until the rest of the men caught up before speaking. “Let’s break here and wait a couple of hours… just in case.”

  Arnason looked around the place the lieutenant had selected. It was a good choice. The rise in the ground they were on gave them a commanding view of the area, and numerous anthills provided protection from grazing fire during an attack. Arnason set up a perimeter with the remaining men. Sinclair was placed in the center of the small circle. Everyone had lost their backpacks during the ambush except Reed, and the only large battle dressing he had was on Sinclair already and saturated with blood. Arnason tried thinking what he could use to stop Sinclair’s bleeding and decided on using his fatigue jacket as a sort of chest tourniquet. He emptied his pockets looking for a soft piece of plastic to seal the hole in Sinclair’s chest with, and the only thing he could find was the cover he used to keep his children’s picture dry. Arnason hesitated for only a second, then pulled the photograph from the plastic and placed the material over the bubbling hole. Lieutenant Reed watched the sergeant work. He squeezed as much blood out of the bandage as he could, placed it back over the wound, tied it snugly, and then tied his jacket around the bandage. It worked; the bleeding slowed down. Arnason opened his left rear ammo pouch that he used for a first-aid kit and removed the last morphine Syrette from its package. He injected the painkiller in Sinclair’s left leg and squeezed the small, collapsible tube until it was empty.

  Woods left his place on the perimeter where he had dropped down exhausted the instant Sinclair had been helped off his back. He staggered over to where Arnason sat as soon as he caught his breath and growled the words. “I’m going back after Spencer!” It wasn’t a request, it was a statement.