Baptism

by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Spencer turned his head until he was looking directly into her eyes. “Fuck you, bitch!”

  “Ah!” She looked at Spencer’s naked groin and smiled. “You have a very filthy tongue. I would show more respect to me if you wish to keep it, young soldier!”

  Barnett tried spitting at her, but his mouth was too dry to produce anything but a small noise. She got the idea, though, of what he was trying to do.

  “It is up to me what POW camp you are sent to. I can make it very easy for you and send you to a civilized camp, or I can leave you here with the field soldiers, who are very angry with Americans.” She grinned. “Join us. James already has, and the two of you can live a good life and have plenty of food, clothes, and…” She ran her finger over his bare hip and just barely touched the edge of his pubic hair.

  “Bitch!” Spencer struggled against his bonds. “I’d rather fuck a pig!”

  She sprang to her feet. “You! You will be taught some manners… American!”

  The survivors of the ambush and the MIKE Force had been in the A-camp for three days waiting for the weather to clear before they could be airlifted back out of the A Shau Valley.

  Woods sat on the perimeter’s log bunker and stared out over the fog in the direction of the mountain. He could think only about Spencer Barnett; it had become an obsession during the past three days. He still had ten months left in Vietnam, and he was going to beg the brigade commander to let him search for his friend.

  “David?” Arnason had called him by his first name ever since they had returned from the patrol. “Come on, Dave, let’s get packed and ready to go. The cav is sending in choppers for us and Sinclair.”

  Sinclair’s chest had been stabilized by the Special Forces medic, who used his single sideband radio to talk with surgeons back in the Da Nang Naval Hospital. Sinclair would lose his lung, but the chances were good that he would live if they could get him back to a surgical hospital in the next couple of days.

  “I’m going to say good-bye to the captain over in the command bunker, and then we’ll wait by the helipad with Sinclair.” Arnason paused before leaving. “Okay?”

  Woods nodded his head and remained staring out over the fog. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to find Spencer.

  Arnason approached the bunker and entered it from the northern door. As soon as he stepped inside, he heard a bunch of Vietnamese chattering over a radio. What caught his attention was that it wasn’t a single voice but a number of people talking all at the same time. He stepped into the first CONEX container on the right after opening the steel door that was always shut when the Cav recon men were in the bunker. The captain and the MIKE Force sergeant, along with the communications NCO, were listening to one of the sensor boxes. Arnason noticed that a tape recorder was recording the whole transmission.

  “What’s going on?” Arnason saw the surprise on the captain’s face, and then the officer held his finger to his lips and pointed for Arnason to take a seat and keep quiet. The transmission was too important for him to take the time to run Arnason out of the top-secret area.

  The Vietnamese voices sounded excited, and a scraping sound like a shovel would make could be heard. Arnason nearly fell backward off his chair when he heard James’s voice coming over the receiver. “I’ve carried out my part of the bargain, Lieutenant. Now you keep your promise to me.”

  A soft Vietnamese voice answered someone else, and then she changed to English. “You have proven yourself and have told me the truth, Mohammed James, and an officer in the People’s Army always keeps her word.”

  “You would never have found these sensors if I wouldn’t have shown you where to find them.”

  “You said that there were six more hidden out here?” The female’s voice was soft.

  “Yes, but the other recon team hid them. That’s all I know—that they’re over there somewhere. Barnett would know if you can get him to cooperate, but I wouldn’t bet on him to help.”

  “We’ll find them, with or without Corporal Barnett. He is causing us too much trouble—” The transmission ended abruptly.

  The captain looked over at Arnason. “We know now what happened to your men.”

  Arnason was almost in shock. “Those sensors have audio speakers in them!”

  “Just two of them. The rest are vibration detectors.”

  “Now the damn NVA have them!” Arnason was angry. “James is a fucking traitor!”

  “You’re half right. James is a traitor, but the NVA don’t have the devices. There are anti-tilt mechanisms in all of them that are activated when the antennas are screwed into the bases. When they dig them up, a small explosive charge burns out the inside circuits, so they have nothing but burned green boxes with fake bamboo-shoot antennas attached to them.”

  The sound of helicopters ended the conversation. Arnason bit his lip trying to control his anger. He looked over at the captain. “I need a copy of that tape.”

  “It’s top-secret.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. Send it top-secret to me!”

  “I promise you that it’ll get in the right hands.” The captain shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “He’s not going to get away with it!” Arnason stormed out of the bunker and nearly ran Lieutenant Reed down.

  “Are you ready to go, Sergeant?” Reed’s eyes looked extremely tired. He had aged ten years.

  “Yeah!”

  Barnett watched James and the NVA intelligence lieutenant return back to the POW camp. He could see that they were carrying some of the sensors, and it didn’t take a great deal of smarts to know what James had done.

  “You fucking traitor!” Barnett tried reaching through the bamboo bars of his cage.

  James stopped walking with the lieutenant and turned to look at Barnett. James was wearing a new set of khaki pants with a leather belt that had a bright red star in the center of the buckle and a short-sleeved shirt. In contrast, Barnett was wearing a pair of black peasant pants, and his body was covered with insect bites and dirt.

  James pointed his finger at his ex-teammate. “You had better be nice to me, honkie, or I’ll ask the lieutenant to give you to me!”

  Barnett watched James enter the bamboo-and-thatch hootch behind the lieutenant, and gave both of them the finger.

  “You had better ease up a bit, young man, or you won’t last very long in this camp.”

  Barnett looked over at the Air Force pilot in the bamboo cage across from his and slowly shook his head. “You’re probably right, Colonel, but you see, I really don’t give a fuck what they do to me.”

  “I can understand that, but you see, I have a selfish reason why you need to gut it out; if they execute you, or even if they break you, they’ll have more time to play with me, and I’m afraid that there are some things that I know that could really cause some problems for the American forces. But if I had, let’s say, a month… just an extra month… the things I know wouldn’t be important anymore.” The Air Force colonel smiled and looked over at the young soldier. “Understand?”

  Spencer understood clearly what the senior Air Force officer was hinting at. He was probably one of those officers who knew a lot of top-secret stuff and was asking for some time, someone to run a little interference for him with the North Vietnamese. Barnett wasn’t dumb. He knew that the NVA could make anyone talk about anything; it was just a matter of time and how much effort they wanted to direct at a person.

  “All right, Colonel, I’ll back off a little, but I want you to know that I’m not afraid of these fucking gooks!”

  “Good. I’m glad that you’re going to help me. What’s your first name?”

  “Spencer.”

  “Thanks, Spencer.” The colonel stopped talking when he saw the guard approaching their cages. He went over to the rear side of his tiny enclosure and drank from the small cup of water he kept there. A hardwood cross was tied to the frame at the corner of his cage, and the colonel reached up and touched the very base of the hand-
carved religious symbol. His thoughts were on asking forgiveness for lying to the boy. He had been a prisoner for two years, and there wasn’t anything he knew that the NVA hadn’t already extracted from him. He knew that if the young soldier kept tormenting the guards and officers, they would execute him to set an example for the rest of the prisoners.

  Corporal Barnett sat in a Vietnamese squat, looked out at the jungle, and thought only of escape. The Air Force colonel was right: fighting the NVA would only make them break him. Escape was the answer!

  Epilogue

  Woods sat cross-legged on top of his fighting bunker and stared out over the rows of concertina wire at the Vietnamese laborers hoeing the new weeds sprouting up. He couldn’t get his mind off Spencer. The few personal items Barnett had in the bunker had been boxed up and stored in the company supply room, but the fighting bunker brought back memories that were haunting him. He recalled the incident when he had discovered the cigar burns on Spencer, and the stories the seventeen-year-old had told him about his days in the South Carolina juvenile home. Spencer Barnett had never had a break in his life; it seemed that he was destined to lose no matter how hard he tried to pull himself up.

  Woods heard voices behind him and twisted around to see who was coming out to his bunker. It was Sergeant Shaw talking to Simpson. They were laughing and teasing each other over some bar girl in Qui Nhon. Anger flashed through Woods’s mind; it just wasn’t fair, guys like Sinclair being badly wounded, Brown and Fitzpatrick being killed in combat, and Spencer and James taken prisoner while these bastards were getting rich selling drugs and running black-market scams. It wasn’t fair!

  Woods rolled over onto his stomach and extended the stock on his CAR-15. He flipped the selector switch to semiautomatic, sighted in on the sandbag wall next to Shaw, and fired. Shaw dropped down on the ground, and Woods was worried for a couple of seconds that he might have actually hit him, but Shaw started crawling for cover. Simpson hunched over and started looking around in every direction, not knowing which way to run. Woods fired three more rapid-fire rounds into the sandbags near Simpson, which convinced Simpson to run to his left. Woods smiled and felt a little better.

  Sergeant Arnason heard the cracking sound of incoming small-arms fire and hurried toward the perimeter. It had sounded like an M16, but during the daylight hours there was a strict moratorium against firing weapons on the perimeter unless an NCO personally authorized it. He met Shaw, running bent over toward him, and stopped him by grabbing his arm. “What’s going on?”

  “Gooks! Firing at us from outside the perimeter!”

  Arnason let the supply sergeant go, and hurried over to his bunker. Woods was sitting calmly on the roof watching a pair of gunships work over the area in front of his bunker.

  “We receive some incoming?” Arnason’s voice was skeptical.

  Woods shrugged his shoulders.

  “Shaw says that some gooks were shooting at him and Simpson.”

  Woods gave the sergeant a blank look and shrugged his shoulders the second time.

  “It was probably a lone sniper harassing the base area.”

  “Probably.” Woods took up his position against the sandbags and pulled his knees up to his chest in a modified fetal position; he was hurting, hurting bad, inside. He had to do something to help Spencer. He had to find a way to get the top brass interested in sending out a team to find the POW camp that had Barnett prisoner.

  Arnason reached over and picked up Woods’s CAR-15 and touched the still warm barrel.

  “It’s been sitting in the sun,” David said without looking at his sergeant.

  Arnason turned the barrel toward his nose and sniffed in the odor of freshly burned gunpowder.

  “I forgot to clean it since we came back from patrol.” Woods stared at the place Spencer used to sit on the bunker’s roof.

  “Damn VC! Messing with our supply sergeant and battalion drug dealer like that!” Arnason replaced the weapon in the exact same spot, against the sandbag wall next to Woods. “Oh, you might be interested. I sent a telex to a Master Sergeant McDonald at the Recondo School in Nha Trang…”

  Woods became fully alert for the first time since they had returned from the A Shau. “Why?”

  “He’s the best man I know of in Vietnam for prisoner snatches. That’s what he was doing up at CCN—Command and Control North—when he got all shot up.”

  “What can he do now?”

  “Help us to find Spencer and James. You know, David, I liked Spencer too….”

  Woods felt like an ass. He’d thought he was the only one who cared. “I’m sorry, Sarge.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. Damn! If I were in your shoes, I’d probably feel the same way you do! Shit, look around you. NCOs running the black market and every one of them has an excuse as to why they’re doing it. Officers fighting each other after a rocket attack to get their own award recommendations in to their buddies in personnel before the system becomes flooded. Hey, David! I’ve been here for years, boy! I’ve seen it all!” Arnason jabbed his finger at Woods. “Do you think for a second that I’d just forget about a soldier like Spencer Barnett?” He turned to drop down through the hole in the bunker roof. “If you did think that I’d forget about him, it would really piss me off!” Arnason disappeared inside the bunker. He called back to Woods. “And no more shooting at our rear-echelon types! You hear?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!”

  Woods opened the green metal ammo box that he used as a storage box for his letters from home and for his stationery. It was time that he wrote a letter back home to his dad and mom and let them know what was going on in the war.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  I’m really rushed right now, but I wanted to thank you for the great CARE package. You can’t get chocolate chip cookies over here and everyone said that they were the best they’ve ever eaten.

  The weather has turned muggy, kinda like that summer we spent down in Louisiana, only it’s uncomfortable all the time, and you always have to watch out for the bugs and stuff.

  We see action pretty regularly (but I’m not going to do anything heroic mom!)

  Thanks for asking about Spencer in your last letter, but I don’t think he’ll be able to come home with me on leave. We sort of fell out of contact, you know, those things happen.

  Love you a lot,

  Also by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Survivor of Nam: P.O.W.

  Survivor of Nam: Black Market

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  Contents

  Welcome

  Chapter One: Maneater

  Chapter Two: Recondo

  Chapter Three: The Ia Drang Valley

  Chapter Four: Raw Meat

  Chapter Five: Murder

  Chapter Six: The A Shau Reconnaissance

  Chapter Seven: Prisoner of War

  Epilogue

  Also by Donald E. Zlotnik

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  Copyright © 198
8 by Grand Central Publishing

  Cover design by Jackie Merri Meyer

  Cover photograph by Burgess Blevins

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First e-book edition: September 2009

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  ISBN 978-0-446-56678-0