The APC driver had left his vehicle and was standing by the lowered tailgate talking to his executive officer.
“Pfc. Caudwell, you know the ole man is going to have a piece of your ass for taking off like that without his permission.”
“Sir, I couldn’t just sit there and watch fellow Americans get slaughtered without trying to help.” The young soldier tapped against the side of the vehicle’s track with his boot.
“Well, stand by. The ole man will want to see you after he’s done talking to Captain Pellam.” The artillery lieutenant left and joined the captains who were standing next to the fortified command bunker. Pfc. Caudwell turned and looked back into his vehicle at the seven American bodies lying in a pool of drying blood. Tears appeared at the corner of the young man’s eyes and broke free, leaving a trail in the red dust covering his face.
Lieutenant Bourne’s eyes opened. He was looking directly into the young soldier’s gaze. “I heard you talking . . . thanks for saving us . . . buddy.”
The private first class turned and yelled at the three officers. “Hey the lieutenant’s still alive!”
The two artillerymen carried Paul on a canvas stretcher to the edge of the helipad and lowered him gently to the ground.
“Sir, I’m going to put a poncho over you to keep the dust out of your wounds when the chopper lands,” the taller of the two men said.
“Sure, just don’t slip me into a body bag . . .” Paul closed his eyes trying to control the pain coursing through him.
“No sweat, Lieutenant. We aren’t about to do that. Man! You sure kicked a lot of ass at the A-Camp. I mean, there’s at least eighty dead gooks up there!”
The short soldier was speaking from the foot of the stretcher. “You’re sure one mean bastard! Sorry, sir . . . What I mean is that you’ve been hit four times and your captain’s only got a—”
The tall soldier placed his hand on his partner’s arm to get him to stop talking. He shook his head and nodded down at the lieutenant, who was in obvious pain.
Paul’s words eased out between the irregular wavelets of severe pain. “Is . .
. is . . . are the rest of my team all right?”
The short soldier looked down at the red clay dust covering his boots.
“They’re all dead except for you and three others . . .” The soldier changed his focal point from his boots up to the sky pretending he was looking for the med-evac.
A long pause ensued, and then Paul released the words that were causing another pain, but this time located in his heart. “All of them? . . . All? ”
“Lie still or you’ll start bleeding again,” the taller man’s voice quavered.
“Where in the hell is that chopper?”
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The low-pitched sound of the med-evac helicopter’s blades could be heard in the quiet predawn morning. The air was cool in Paul’s lungs when he took in short breaths. A large breath caused pain to engulf his whole body, so he breathed gingerly, stopping frequently when red sparks flashed in front of his eyes. Paul turned his head to one side and was suddenly very much aware of the smell of new canvas. For some unknown reason, the odor had a soothing effect on him. It conjured up thoughts of security and comforting hands.
He felt the tears form and simply let them fall and dampen the rough material under his cheek.
Paul’s lips trembled and then the words formed: “Six Americans dead . . .
Eighty Vietnamese . . . and all because of one pissy ass slap on the face! Damn!
Damn! Damn!”
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5
Aclean, antiseptic smell registered in Lieutenant Bourne’s nostrils.
Paul told his eyes to open and they fluttered before responding to his mental command. The bright sunlight shining through the open screened windows forced his eyelids to snap shut. Paul sent a message down to his legs querying them for information. A message returned through his nervous system, written in pain that was caused by the slight movement of his muscles. He moved his fingers. They worked. He tried hard to identify his location without the aid of his sight. His brain began to col-late information he was receiving through smell and touch, and by rehash-ing the events that he could remember before he was med-evac’ed from Duc Co. He could recall being wounded and flown out of his A-Camp on the steel floor of a helicopter. He shivered, recalling the extreme changes in the temperature when the helicopter had changed altitudes during its flight. Paul reasoned that he must be lying in a hospital bed somewhere near Pleiku.
Before he could attempt opening his eyes again a voice reached him from across the room.
“I hope you don’t mind sharing this room . . . sharing this room . . . sharing this room . . .” The booming voice echoed in Paul’s mind.
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“Where am I?” Lieutenant Bourne’s voice sounded to him as if he were screaming and he lowered it halfway through his sentence.
“Ah! The proverbial question coming from the awakening wounded soldier!” The other man in the room pushed his call button as he spoke. “You’ll have to speak louder so I can hear you.”
A bright-eyed doctor who was followed closely by a nurse entered through the thin wooden door and walked straight over to Paul’s bedside.
“Well, how are we feeling? Better? Good!” The voice sounded as if it were a tape recording, not really wanting an answer to its questions.
Paul cracked his eyes open slowly and fought the urge to close them. He began blinking rapidly so that he could focus on the doctor’s face. It took a minute before he could see anything clearly. “Feeling better than what?” He turned his head away from the light source to ease the pain in his eyes.
The doctor didn’t answer and talked with the nurse. Paul’s mind only grasped bits and pieces of the conversation as he drifted between consciousness and nothingness. He felt someone take hold of his arm with cold fingers, and then felt a slight prick as the needle found his vein.
“His head should clear up in a few minutes.” The nurse was speaking to the doctor as she left the room.
Paul could feel the physical awareness rapidly spread throughout his whole body. A dull pain was coming from several locations. His mind started working faster as the medicine reached his brain. Finally, the drug had removed the steel straps from his mind. Lieutenant Bourne turned his head on the pillow in the direction from which the voice had spoken to him earlier.
“They have it down to a fine art, don’t they? I mean, putting you under and then bringing you back with drugs. A person could almost enjoy the process . . .” A soldier was sitting in an upright position across the aisle from Paul. The sheet was tucked neatly under him where his legs should have been.
One of his arms was missing from his shoulder. “I’m Lieutenant Beusenal from the Third Herd.”
Paul looked over at the foot of Beusenal’s bunk and saw the 173d Airborne’s shoulder patch attached to the bed frame in a metal holder.
“How long have you been with Special Forces?”
“How do you know I’m SF?” Paul tried scooting up on his pillow, but stopped when a fire-hot streak of pain shot up his side.
Beusenal ignored the pain on Paul’s face and spoke. “They place a shoulder patch on everyone’s bed so the visiting commanders can locate their troops.”
“Ummm . . . how long have I been under?” Paul’s eyes roved around the stark hospital room.
“You’ve been in this room since early this morning.” The lieutenant used his remaining arm to adjust his body position. “I think you were in the recov-73
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ery room for a couple of hours after they worked on you . . . Looks like you did all right, I mean everythin
g is still there.”
“Thanks. I guess I was lucky.” Paul turned his head and moved his arm up slowly so that he could reach the call button. He pushed the red switch and waited for the nurse.
“Well, you’re looking a lot better.” The doctor had answered the call. He spoke in a self-defensive monotone. The doctor was treating soldiers who were wounded in a war that he hated. “Nurse, prepare him for a check-up while I look at Lieutenant Beusenal.”
Paul felt embarrassed when the nurse pulled the sheet back, exposing his bandaged body that was otherwise naked. The embarrassment left Paul when he thought of what could have happened to his genitals. He was glad that they were still there. Paul’s eyes roved over the nurse’s face. She had a pert turned-up nose with beautiful gray-green eyes, which seemed to absorb energy from anything they looked at and return the electrical shine to targets of her choosing. She sensed Paul’s embarrassment.
“Don’t feel shy. I’ve been taking care of you for the past three days in the intensive care unit.” Her eyes wandered down to Paul’s generously endowed sex organs.
“You might have been looking at me for three days, but I haven’t had the opportunity to look back.”
She blushed. “You soldiers are all alike! Doctor, this animal is ready!”
A burst of laughter came from Beusenal. “I’ll have to remember that line!”
Paul looked at Beusenal. He couldn’t figure out how the man could be so happy with both of his legs and an arm gone. Maybe the laughter was fake.
The nurse took Paul’s attention from the amputee when she yanked a bandage off his side.
“They’re healing very nicely. “You’re a lucky man. We’ve taken twenty-six pieces of shrapnel and two bullets out of you. A couple of them were lodged in critical areas. Very lucky! Your aorta has been bruised, but we think it will heal without any serious complications.” The doctor repeated himself. “You’re a very lucky young man!”
Paul glanced at Beusenal out of the corner of his eye. He felt very guilty.
The doctor followed Paul’s glance and realized his error. “Of course, complications can set in . . .” It was too late. The damage had been done to Beusenal.
Paul chanced a glance at his roommate after the medical team had left their room. The man’s defenses were all down and grief was cut in deep lines across his face.
“I’m sorry.” Paul couldn’t think of nothing else to say.
Lieutenant Beusenal didn’t answer. He closed his eyes and turned his head, trying to feign sleep.
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Only the soft night lights above the beds were burning when Paul was woken by the muffled sound of someone releasing a soul-searing anguish into a pillow. Paul pushed the switch attached to the side of his bed to raise his body so that he could see across the aisle from him.
“Is there anything that I can do?” Paul spoke softly in the half-light. There was no answer.
He waited.
“Hell! I’m just feeling sorry for myself. You know I wanted to get married
. . . have a couple of kids . . . that sort of dumb thing . . .” The voice was barely audible above the sound of the ceiling fan. “Who would want to marry me now?”
Paul fought to find a suitable answer. Nothing came.
“I really shouldn’t sit here and cry like a fucking baby! So many others died
. . . so damn many!” The voice choked back the sobs.
“What happened?” Paul’s war wounds and his occupancy of a hospital bed gave him the right to ask that question without seeming pushy. A half-hour passed. Paul waited patiently.
“We were patrolling as a team—Alpha and Charlie Companies. We had just finished searching the mountain range east of Dak To when our company commander gave the order over his radio to head back down the mountain slope to the brigade’s base camp. Alpha Company, Second Battalion—that was my company—was in the lead ahead of Charlie Company, who brought up the rear three thousand meters behind us.” There was a long pause while Beusenal thought about something that he didn’t want to share with Paul.
“Hell—we could see Dak To airstrip below us! Even the general’s tent. We weren’t four thousand meters from the center of the base camp.”
A loud moan coming from down the hall interrupted the lieutenant.
“The captain called the platoon leaders over the radio and said that the last platoon getting into camp wouldn’t get any beer. We knew that he was bullshitting, but we enjoyed the challenge anyway. The real threat was not getting any water for showers. You know how fast they run out of water when three hundred men all want to shower at the same time.” Beusenal paused again in his story, and thought for a long time about something that was extremely painful for him to talk about. “Then we did something really stupid.
It didn’t seem so at the time, but man was it dumb! They wouldn’t allow us to enter the base camp with any tear gas once a case had been broken open. You know how they were afraid that we’d frag some asshole rear-area officer or something . . . well, we pulled the pins on our tear-gas grenades and dropped all of our powdered tear gas along the trail as we hustled downhill. I can remember someone saying that we had better hold up on the tear gas because Charlie Company was following. Everyone started laughing over what 75
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Charlie Company would do when they hit our tear gas ambush. I mean, it was funny at the time . . . but dumb! Do you understand?”
Paul nodded his head in agreement, allowing Beusenal to continue telling his story.
“I was a lieutenant . . . shit, I should have tried stopping them, but shit, who would have listened to me? Anyway, we started to run down the hill ahead of the tear gas. The wind was pushing the gas down trail—except for the powdered stuff, which stayed on the trail. The First Platoon was about three hundred meters ahead of us. I was next . . .”
The soft creaking coming from the fan filled the room as Beusenal stopped talking. A nurse walking down the hallways stopped a half-dozen doors away and pushed open a closed door to check on a patient. Paul waited.
“All hell broke loose . . .” The words were spoken so softly that Paul had to strain to hear. “I mean the world came alive! I was told later that a North Vietnamese battalion was trying to sneak around the big Dak To base camp and that the first platoon ran right into it. Do you remember the cowboy movies we’d seen when we were kids, where the buffalo would stampede over a cliff and because of the momentum they would just tumble over the edge?”
Paul remained silent.
“Well . . . that was us . . . we just couldn’t stop in time. The whole First Platoon didn’t last three minutes. The way they were strung out . . . The NVA had it easy.” Beusenal paused again and wandered somewhere in his own personal world. Fifteen minutes passed before he spoke again. “I had enough time to stop my platoon and form a half-assed battle line. We held them for about ten minutes but then they outflanked us. Christ! There were hundreds of them! Like fucking ants! We pulled back to the Third Platoon, and then all of us pulled back into the Heavy-Weapons Platoon. We lost a lot of men. We found out later that a lot of them had been cut off from us, and had been individually killed by the NVA. They weren’t taking any prisoners . . . yet.”
Beusenal sighed.
“What remained of the company formed up on a small ledge about a hundred meters wide and covered with bamboo and underbrush. We couldn’t see shit. Man, we killed hundreds of those cocksuckers.”
Beusenal drifted off into a world of a mentally relived terror that was reflected to Paul on the man’s face. He blinked a few dozen times in rapid succession and then spoke.
“Charlie Company couldn’t get to us because of that goddamn tear gas!
They had to break new trail through the jungle. They tried . . . I know they tried . . .” His voice rose to a near-hysterical pitch. “We held the
m most of the afternoon. They broke through a couple of times, but we pushed them back out of our perimeter. They were fighting for their lives, too. If they didn’t stay 76
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in close contact with us, they knew we would call in artillery on them. The base camp still fired our artillery at them—direct fire . . . but all of a sudden the artillery fire stopped . . . it just stopped . . . That’s when we really got our asses kicked.” Beusenal turned his head and looked out the window. When he spoke again the sentences were fragmented. “. . . I wonder why . . . I shot one in the face . . . Oh! . . . I can’t stand to hear the screaming . . . oh shit . . . I tried . . . really . . .”
“Tough fight.” Paul felt that he had to say something. He had actually felt the intensity of the battle through Beusenal’s words. He hoped the lieutenant had released some of the horrible anguish by telling the story to him. He looked over and saw that Beusenal had his eyes closed. Paul lowered his bed and tried to find sleep. He reviewed the horror of Beusenal’s story for over an hour in the darkness of the room.
“Thanks, Bourne.” Beusenal had also remained awake.
“Get some rest, buddy.”
The rattle from the breakfast trays being unloaded in the hall brought Paul from his sound sleep. He was feeling hungry before he even opened his eyes. He thought it was a good sign that he was healing. Paul raised his bed and glanced over to see if Beusenal was going to eat.
The room was filled with bright sunlight that accented the dark red stain covering half of Beusenal’s white hospital sheet. The lieutenant’s head was turned toward Paul. The man’s eyes were open.
Paul reached up for his call button and pushed. Seconds passed as he stared at Beusenal’s black face. He pushed the button again. Paul yelled for a nurse and threw his sheet aside, dropping his legs over the edge of the bed. His bare feet felt the cold cement floor just before a sharp pain caused his vision to become interlaced with bright blue flashes. He stood up, grabbing for the nearby nightstand for support. His unused muscles rebelled but he forced them to obey. Paul fell against the side of Beusenal’s bed and saw the razor-sharp scalpel lying on the paratrooper lieutenant’s chest with his remaining hand lying across his lap cut at the wrist.
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