Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  Even the possibility of VC surging into the perimeter was preferable to Miser's spewing, those ruined teeth an inch from the kid's face. A couple of them giggled nervously.

  "What are you ladies gawking at?" Miser snarled. "Macquorcadale, you giant bimbo, ain't you noticed you're too fucking tall for your firing position. Dig a hole!" Miser barked.

  The soldier stood dumbfounded, looking at Miser like he had lost his mind.

  "You got sand in your pussy or something?" he shouted at the Canadian. "Dig a hole to stand in, before I use that entrenching tool to realign your brains. You"—he pointed to our two privates—"help 'im."

  The three of them dug at the hard ground, using helmets and a shovel like pickaxes, their fear momentarily forgotten as they obeyed the absurd order. The rest of us trained our weapons on the perimeter wall.

  "Last man standing," Miser announced with glee, "pop the thermite grenade in the crypto van."

  A tense hour passed. Ten o'clock. Nothing.

  I left Miser with the detachment and circled the defensive positions, where I ran into Colonel Bennett and Joe Parks. We went to ground at the southernmost corner, behind the sandbag bunker housing the .50, and stayed flush with its perforated steel walls.

  "What do you think, Captain Rider?" Bennett said.

  "Seems too early in the evening for a ground attack."

  "Two in the morning would be more their style," said Joe Parks.

  I said, "Do you get the feeling we're supposed to keep our heads down?"

  Joe nodded. "Yes, sir. They're on the move and don't want us to see them."

  "Passing that close?" Bennett said, concerned.

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "Okay. We stay turtles."

  I went back to patrolling the compound. At half past midnight, I noticed a lanky figure slipping along the bungalow walkway, heading to the medic's room. At 0300 Sergeant Rowdy sought me out.

  "Captain," he whispered, "you should know. Either the ARVN stopped answering their field phone or the landline's cut. Gate guard wants you too."

  I stayed in the shadows and announced my arrival with a hoarse "Hey, what's up?"

  Something struck the roof behind us and tapped its way to the ground.

  "Like that," Hump said. "Sticks and rocks have been coming over for the last quarter hour."

  "Probers trying to draw your fire?"

  "Or ARVN harassing us again from across the street."

  "The signal shack called over there but they're not responding."

  A stone struck the ground and skipped toward us. Another clanked against the steel of the encircling outer wall. Somewhere Deros was barking. If the enemy was coming, we'd know it when they scaled the perimeter or stormed the gate.

  "Fire only if you've got a target or you're taking fire," I ordered. "Pass the word. I'm going for a look. Put up a flare."

  I snuck up to the wall, hunched over, and peered over the top. No human sounds. A handheld flare punched into the air, whooshed up, and ignited, drifting slowly back to earth. Nothing moved except the odd quivering shadows cast by its magnesium light.

  Not thirty feet away, five NVA wearing pith helmets perched like ravens on top of the steel wall. Hump cut loose with his M-16. AKs flashed rounds back. Hump fired again, and there were three. I blew the closest Charlie off the wall with a burst, hyperventilating as I did. The remaining pair smacked the sentry box with green tracers. Hump knocked another one backward. I accounted for the last one, discarded my empty magazine, and snapped in another.

  The flare extinguished. I tossed a grenade over the steel wall and sprinted back toward Hump, yelling, "It's me, it's me!" The grenade crumped, throwing up dirt. My toe caught and sent me sprawling headfirst.

  Hump spat curses, breathing rapidly, eyes white. I groped around for another flare. Hump beat me to it and launched one. Somewhere on the perimeter a short burst of a 16 clattered.

  I crawled into Hump's position and shouldered my weapon, waiting for the artificial light. The flare popped and floated down. No one scaling the wall. No one in the barbed wire securing the gate. The field phone whirred. The colonel. I gave him the report: five North Vietnamese regulars probing the gate area, repelled.

  We waited for the full attack. A short volley chattered from a bunker, red tracers arcing out. No other firing. The ARVN battery finally launched three illumination rounds, turning the world silver and black, straining our eyes with their intense, quivering light. Boots scurried toward us. Four more men joined our position.

  Long minutes ticked by under the completely black sky, with only a little starlight. Hump fell asleep standing up, slumped against the sandbags, rifle butt at his shoulder. I was fully awake, high on adrenaline, my pupils like raisins. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through pursed lips.

  It seemed like yesterday I'd processed stateside for the last time with a bunch of grunts like Hump. A short truck ride had brought us to an overnight shelter, a tent city for transients. All the flaps were raised. Each ten-man tent was encircled by a two-foot-high wall of sandbags, just slightly lower than the cots inside, hardly affording protection from small arms, and none from mortars. The transients bedded down and were asleep inside of two minutes. Nobody even removed a boot. The camp went black; no lights, no cigarettes. The unlucky few, myself included, drew guard duty.

  Half the sentries were green newcomers; the other half, mangy GIs with just hours left in country. White rings of fungus spotted our sunburned complexions. The newbies were coming, we were going. The veterans, bleary and thin, worked out their angles of fire and guard rotations. None of them gave a thought to a formal guard mount and I wasn't about to line them up for one. They were not to be fucked with their last night standing guard in Viet Nam.

  The first watch filed out of the guard bunker. The rest passed out on bare cots. In seconds the short-timers were cutting Zs. They were skittish sleepers, coming sharply awake from time to time. Seeing where they were, they instantly fell back asleep again. In the distance, big guns and small arms occasionally barked and burped. The new guys lay awake, thinking about those going home to the land of milk and green money, and wondering what lay ahead for the ones staying.

  It was some ungodly hour when we landed in the States. In a rare gesture, the Army was laying on chow around the clock in a dolled-up mess hall, anything you wanted. Steak, chops, grits, ice cream, banana cream pie, rhubarb custard, whatever. You could indulge like a condemned man. No one did. Just drank milk pretty much continuously, plain and chocolate, and waited. For new uniforms, for leave papers, or to muster out. Nobody said anything. Just played with light switches or examined their empty glasses, not having seen a glass glass in a year. Or real milk.

  Now, waiting in the dark, I wondered where they all were. How they'd made out. Why I wasn't with them.

  It was nearly four in the morning, too late for an attack. Bennett appeared, and he and I spent the rest of what darkness was left checking the American defenders and the Montagnard sentries. The sunrise was overcast and hazy, but to me it was spectacular.

  My left sock was soggy. I'd been slowly bleeding into my boot. I limped to the dispensary, leaving bloody footprints on the concrete walk. Roberta finished wrapping a private's palm and what was left of his thumb. The first sergeant led him away. Dark circles rimmed Roberta's eyes. Curls stuck to her face.

  "We have to stop meeting this way," she said, trying to sound brave.

  Roberta cut the left leg off my fatigue pants, exposing a bloody gash across the back of my leg. I could see the sweat in her scalp. Her hands trembled slightly. A shard of something was stuck in the meat of the calf muscle. I hadn't felt much of anything when it happened. Now it screamed as she numbed it with Novocain and worked the jagged metal loose, sterilized the wound, and stitched it closed.

  "Self-inflicted?" she said.

  "Yeah, well. You can't blame a guy." The bravado sounded hollow. We were both exhausted. "You okay?"

  She bit her lip. "Scared
to death, but otherwise having a lovely evening, thank you." As she snapped off her rubber gloves, she kissed me on the forehead.

  "I like your bedside manner."

  She doused the wound with sulfa and dressed the sewn-up gash. "Get out of here," she said, and turned to a kid waiting by the door holding his arm, blood seeping between his fingers.

  "Thanks, Doc," I said. She didn't reply, already focused on him. I limped to my room barefoot and put on fresh socks and boots.

  An hour later, Sergeant Divivo snuck out the back with six men for a short first-light reconnaissance. No sign of the probers we had shot off the wall except for blood trails. Divivo radioed in that there was something odd at the designated escape-and-evasion pickup point we were supposed to sneak to in the dark if the compound fell.

  Parks keyed the mike. "What?" he said. "What's odd? Over."

  "Better come. You'll want to see this for yourselves."

  Parks and I drove out to the pickup coordinates. A field. Olive-drab underwear hung head-high on wires strung like clotheslines between the few saplings, an American grenade lashed to each, the pins crimped flat, loops tied to the wire. The downdraft of incoming helicopter propellers would lift the T-shirts and shorts, yank the wires taut, pull the pins, arm the grenades.

  "So much for superior technology," Joe said.

  "I don't believe these dinks, Sarge. Now they're attacking us with our own underwear. I'm never wearing any again."

  "Some sacrifice. You don't now."

  How had the NVA gotten so close to the compound? How had they slipped past the ARVN perimeter to reach us? Were they so expert in the dark, or had the ARVN let them pass unchallenged? Our allies hadn't fired a shot, even after the shooting started.

  The town remained shut, the Vietnamese battalion locked down. Checkman drove to the airstrip with an armed escort to meet the incoming courier flight. On the way back, he noticed four black splotches on the outside of the perimeter wall. The colonel and I went along with Joe Parks to investigate.

  "There," Checkman said, pointing.

  Sergeant Parks knelt next to a smudge. He clenched the pipe in his teeth and touched the stain, rubbed it between his fingers, and sniffed. "Motor oil."

  Checkman was embarrassed. "That's all? Just motor oil?"

  Joe Parks said, "I've seen this before. The VC splash motor oil on steel to make an adhesive for C-four charges. Makes the putty stick, even to wet metal."

  "C-four is pliable," Checkman said. "Couldn't they just push it into the perforations in the planks?"

  "NVA don't improvise," Bennett said. "They do it exactly as rehearsed."

  "True, sir," Parks said. "They're rigidly disciplined. Crept up to here in the dark and prepped the steel with motor oil, as ordered." He scratched at his cheek with the pipe stem. "Maybe while we were distracted with the assault at the gate."

  "Cut the commo wire to ARVN too," I said.

  Joe nodded. "Planned on rain giving them cover when they stormed our perimeter. They were relying on the bad weather to deny us air support and keep from getting anviled from the air when they were done with us."

  Joe stood up. "Except blessedly it didn't pour. So they canceled. They must have been sitting out there half the night, waiting for a downpour."

  "They skipped us because it didn't rain," Checkman said, awe in his voice.

  "Joe," I said, "you think they have some reserve force prepping to assault us the next time it pours?"

  Parks shook his head. "Undoubtedly they left a reserve in the foothills. But the units that rehearsed the attack on the compound must be en route to their main objective by now. I think we're okay." He looked at the colonel. "The mobilized battalions are past us, sir. They're off our plateau and in the mountains ... on their way to whoever's going to take the full brunt. We got a reprieve."

  "No thanks to ARVN," I said, "who did absolutely nothing."

  Bennett licked his dry lips, face bathed in sweat, his blond hair dark with it. "Damn. It's like someone walking on your grave."

  When we returned to the gate, the civilians were just leaving. Lund and his colleagues were almost the last in line, driving out. Ruchevsky, in his Bronco, waved me over.

  "Captain Cox and Sergeant Grady are waiting on us by the river," he said.

  I got in and Ruchevsky sprayed gravel rushing through the gate. "What's up?" I said.

  "The snatch. The courier is getting closer. We need a head session."

  Ruchevsky drove us to the edge of town to where the Ea River joined the Ayun, and where off-duty advisers and civilians occasionally congregated at sunset, like Californians. A peaked thatched roof, like on a Montagnard longhouse, rose over an elevated earthen floor, supported by six wooden columns. The place was sunbaked and bare. Nearby, a gaunt Vietnamese watered a cadaverous herd of horned cattle. Captain Cox sat behind the wheel of the Special Forces jeep; Sergeant Grady leaned against it. The back bulged with essential supplies: ammo, Budweiser, a crate of Vienna sausages, a bag of mail. A bullet hole blistered the windshield on the passenger side.

  Cox stepped out as we rolled to a stop. "Welcome, pilgrims."

  "Captain." Ruchevsky greeted him and nodded to Grady. "Sarge."

  "Vandals?" I said, indicating the punctured glass.

  Grady said, "Some cracker tried to light us up on the way in."

  I said, "I can't believe you drove in after what went on last night."

  Grady snorted in derision. "Police action is all that was. Wouldn't hardly qualify as a fight."

  Ruchevsky said to Cox, "You want to lay it out?"

  Captain Cox slipped off his green beret and pushed it through an epaulet. "Big John thinks our target is accompanied by four or five escorts and hauling a radio and a couple kilos of paper."

  "They don't trust radio communications," Ruchevsky said. "They commit a lot to paper."

  "Is he transmitting as he goes?" I said, trying to get an inkling of how he was being tracked.

  The pair looked to Ruchevsky. He hesitated a beat. "Yeah," he said.

  "Morse or voice?"

  "Not voice. He's using a key."

  The guy wouldn't be transmitting that much while trekking. Had John substituted one of his agents for a VC guide along one of the legs of the trail? Easily done. The guides had little contact with one another or their Vietnamese handlers, and the infiltrators walking the trail were strangers.

  Cox drew a crude map in the dirt film on the hood.

  "We'll rendezvous with the chopper near the abandoned A camp at Buon Beng and load out from there. We dress and camouflage at the old camp, arm up with CAR-fifteens, silenced. The silencers are handmade, but they work." He brought out two rifles from the jeep. "Sight them in ahead of time. Everything stays under wraps. We want as little attention as possible beforehand."

  "Right," I concurred.

  "Rider, you'll hump the radio and handle our communications. Sarge will haul the extra battery and a grenade launcher."

  "How do we get put in?" Ruchevsky said.

  "By Huey. I just spoke to the colonel. Bennett is laying on a flight of three ships the day after tomorrow to help cloak our mission."

  "That soon?" I said, taken aback.

  "Affirmative. The birds will make half a dozen touchdowns. Four will be false insertions. We'll get off at one of them. The colonel and his people will jump off at another."

  "With any luck," Grady said, "we won't be detected. Then two hours of humping to reach the ambush site. It's not an area any Americans have been in, other than John. So we'll risk taking trails. Big John says there are plenty."

  Ruchevsky nodded and Grady went on.

  "We get to the ambush point, familiarize ourselves, and take up positions for the night."

  "What's the pecking order?" Ruchevsky said.

  Grady said, "Jarai Willie walks point. I follow, walking slack. Captain Rider, behind me, handles the radio. Followed by Captain Cox with the grenade launcher, followed by John. The other Yard, Rot, walks drag and cove
rs up our tracks."

  "And you're confident," I said, "that your Yards aren't VC?"

  "Completely," Cox said. "Grady I'm less sure about."

  "Where do we intercept the travelers?" I asked.

  "They'll lay over in a rest station near a shallow branch that leads into the river proper." He drew an oxbow in the dust on the hood and an X for the rest hut. "The next morning they'll set out just before dawn and ford the little river a few minutes later. The water's not deep yet, about knee high. Their point man will cover their crossing." He drew a trail and tapped out dots along it. "We spring the ambush when they start up again on the other side. Okay?"

  We nodded.

  Cox pointed his chin toward Grady. "Sarge."

  Sergeant Grady propped a foot up on the front fender and leaned on his knee. "The Yards will take care of the point guy and their rear guard. We'll each have a man to take down, except Big John. I'm hopin' the silencers do the job but, you know, out of half a dozen spooked gooks, somebody's going to yell out and like that. Still, it'll be remote, early morning, right on the edge of thick jungle. The next closest group traveling that stretch of trail should be ten klicks back. It oughta go okay."

  He paused to see if we wanted to say anything.

  "Right," he continued. "Big John's responsible for neutralizing the radioman and prepping him for travel. Smack 'im, gag him—whatever works, big man. Just as long as he's standing and mobile. We don't carry nobody. We do the snatch and cut out for the extraction point. John, you got fifteen seconds to subdue him and get him up and running once we take 'em down. Fifteen seconds ... and we're gone."

  Grady said, "Our priority is the courier and whatever paper he's carrying. If we get into a jam, trash the Commie radio and abandon it—lighten the load. We won't have no backup team to drop in and save our sorry butt ends if we get in the shit. Comport yourselves accordingly."

  "And if it goes wrong?" Ruchevsky asked, for the record. "Or the guy refuses to march ... collapses from the heat?"